Energy-efficient data gathering in large wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we investigate an energy-efficient data gathering scheme that prolongs the lifetime of battery-powered sensor nodes. We consider two points in our scheme: turning off some sensor nodes' radio components when they needn't participate in data forwarding and reducing communication path length. To achieve the above two points, the proposed scheme constructs and maintains a spanning tree that is based on breadth-first search and has more leaf nodes in network. Sensor nodes transfer data by the path in the tree. Our simulation results show that our scheme consumes much less energy than previous known schemes.