Optimal Data Gathering Paths and Energy-Balance Mechanisms in Wireless Networks

A wireless sensor network faces special challenges due to its inherent features, such as the limited energy. The energy constraint drives research on how to utilize energy efficiently to prolong the lifetime of the network. Because a sink node takes the responsibility of collecting data from other nodes, a usual conception is to transfer data towards the sink node by multi hop. The data gathering problem in wireless networks, where data generated at the nodes has to be collected at a single sink. The authors investigate the relationship between routing optimality and fair resource management.