An energy efficient spanning tree based multi-hop routing in wireless sensor networks

Use of multiple paths in data gathering for wireless sensor networks balances energy dissipation among nodes in the network and maximizes network lifetime. The lifetime of such sensor system is the time when base station can receive data from all sensors in the network. A single best path puts extra load to a specific node causing lower lifetime. Obtaining paths to balance energy among nodes and use them for suitable number of rounds maximize the network lifetime. Several existing protocols formulate this maximum lifetime data gathering problem as flow augmentation problem and use linear programming approach to solve. Essentially, a path in the network forms a spanning tree rooted at sink. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient spanning tree (EESR) based multi-hop routing in a homogeneous network that maximizes the network lifetime. Given the location of the sensor nodes and base station, EESR generates a sequence of routing paths with appropriate number of rounds that maximize the lifetime of the system. Our simulation results show that our proposed technique outperforms previous methods to maximize network lifetime.