Node Lifetime - Network Lifetime Tradeoff for Data Gathering Trees in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

We study the performance of the bottleneck node weight-based data gathering trees (BNW-DG) and bottleneck link weight-based data gathering (BLW-DG) trees in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) through extensive simulations. The BNW-DG trees incur a smaller diameter and a significantly larger fraction of nodes as leaf nodes; whereas the BLW-DG trees incur a larger diameter and a relatively lower fraction of nodes as leaf nodes. The characteristic of incurring a larger number of leaf nodes protects the majority of the nodes in the network from simultaneously being exhausted of their energy; nevertheless the nodes that serve as intermediate nodes in the first few instances of the BNW-DG trees are bound to lose their energy more quickly than the rest of the nodes, leading to a smaller node lifetime (round of first node failure), but a significantly larger network lifetime (minimum number of rounds by which the network gets either disconnected due to node failures or the fraction of coverage loss exceeds a threshold). The BLW-DG trees incur a significantly larger node lifetime than the BNW-DG trees (by a factor of 2.5-3); but, the network lifetime of the BLW-DG trees is only at most 15% larger than that of the BNW-DG trees, indicating a node lifetime-network lifetime tradeoff for data gathering trees in WSNs.