An online heuristic for maximum lifetime routing in wireless sensor networks

We show that the problem of routing messages in a wireless sensor network so as to maximize network lifetime is NP-hard. In our model, the online model, each message has to be routed without knowledge of future route requests. We also develop an online heuristic to maximize network lifetime. Our heuristic, which performs two shortest path computations to route each message, is superior to previously published heuristics for lifetime maximization - our heuristic results in greater lifetime and its performance is less sensitive to the selection of heuristic parameters. Additionally, our heuristic is superior on the capacity metric.