Efficient Convergecast Tree for data collection in Wireless Sens or Networks

One of the most important operations of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is data collection. Due to power limitation of sensors, the process of data collection from nodes in the network towards the sink must be simple and energy-aware. In this regard, tree routing is suitable for data collection in WSNs, because each node only needs to know its parent to forward data packets. However, a non load-balancing tree makes some nodes consume energy faster than others. In this paper, a new tree routing protocol is introduced which prolongs the network lifetime via load-balancing. It is named Efficient Convergecast Tree (ECT). ECT is a distributed algorithm that constructs an approximate load-balanced shortest-path spanning tree by using local information. Simulation results show that ECT protocol fairly increases the network lifetime and throughput.