Tree structure based data gathering for maximum lifetime in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are envisioned to be promising in gathering useful information from areas of interest. Due to the limited battery power of sensors, one critical issue in designing a wireless sensor network is to maximize its lifetime. Many efforts have been made to deal with this problem. However, most existing algorithms are not well optimized. In this paper, we investigate the maximum lifetime data gathering problem formally. We adopt tree structure as the basic routing scheme for our analysis, and propose a near optimal maximum lifetime data gathering and aggregation algorithm MLDGA. MLDGA tries to minimize the total energy consumption in each round as well as maximize the lifetime of a routing tree used in the round. Comparing with existing algorithms which are only efficient in some specified conditions, the simulation results show that our algorithm performs well regardless of the base station location and the initial battery energy levels of sensors.