A Heuristic for Maximizing the Lifetime of Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, many researchers have studied efficiently gathering data in wireless sensor networks to minimize the total energy consumption when a fixed number of data are allowed to be aggregated into one packet. However, minimizing the total energy consumption does not imply the network lifetime is maximized. In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling data aggregation trees working for different time periods to maximize the network lifetime when a fixed number of data are allowed to be aggregated into one packet. In addition, we propose a heuristic to balance the lifetime of nodes in data aggregation trees such that the network lifetime is maximized. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic provides a good performance.