Lifetime Optimization by Load-Balanced and Energy Efficient Tree in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), often composed of a large number of sensor nodes with limited power, have been widely used for environmental monitoring and battlefield surveillance. A basic operation in such networks is data gathering. In the applications of data gathering without aggregation, the 1-hop nodes always incur much heavier traffic load compared with other nodes, which determine the lifetime of the whole network. Due to the energy constrained nature of sensor devices, energy-efficient methods should be employed for data gathering. In this paper, we propose a Load-Balanced and energy-efficient Tree (LBT) algorithm to maximize the lifetime of WSNs, which takes into account the load balance and energy efficiency of 1-hop nodes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present the upper bound of network lifetime for data gathering without aggregation with tree-based topology. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm utilizes up to 98 % of the total energy of the 1-hop nodes and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of network lifetime. Furthermore, LBT can achieve a lifetime consistently close to the upper bound.