Distributed and localized maximum-lifetime data aggregation forest construction in wireless sensor networks

Recently, employing an in-network data aggregation forest has been proposed to achieve energy saving in wireless sensor networks with multiple sinks. The construction of an in-network maximum-lifetime data aggregation forest was shown NP-complete, and only one centralized algorithm in the literature was designed to solve it. The centralized algorithm suffers from significant control overhead especially when forest adjustment is required. In this paper, we propose a distributed and localized algorithm for maximum-lifetime data aggregation forest construction in wireless sensor networks. The sensor nodes are organized into a forest consisting of multiple data aggregation trees in a distributed manner. Besides, a localized forest refinement mechanism is presented to achieve better load balancing. Finally, to prolong the network lifetime, we introduce a forest adjustment mechanism for low-energy sensor nodes. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the prior centralized algorithm in terms of network lifetime and control overhead. Moreover, the experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is more scalable than the prior centralized algorithm.