Online Data Gathering for Maximizing Network Lifetime in Sensor Networks

Energy-constrained sensor networks have been deployed widely for monitoring and surveillance purposes. Data gathering in such networks is often a prevalent operation. Since sensors have significant power constraints (battery life), energy efficient methods must be employed for data gathering to prolong network lifetime. The authors consider an online data gathering problem in sensor networks, which is stated as follows: Assume that there is a sequence of data gathering queries, which arrive one by one. To respond to each query as it arrives, the system builds a routing tree for it. Within the tree, the volume of the data transmitted by each internal node depends on not only the volume of sensed data by the node itself, but also the volume of data received from its children.