Constructing a Shortest Path Overhearing Tree with Maximum Lifetime in WSNs

Secure data collection is an important problem in wireless sensor networks. Different approaches have been proposed. One of them is overhearing. We investigate the problem of constructing a shortest path overhearing tree with the maximum lifetime. We propose three approaches. The first one is a polynomial-time heuristic. The second one uses ILP (Integer Linear Programming) to iteratively find a monitoring node and a parent for each sensor node. The last one optimally solves the problem by using MINLP (Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming). We have implemented the three approaches using MIDACO solver and MATLAB Intlinprog, and performed extensive simulations using NS2.35. The simulation results show that the average lifetime of all the network instances achieved by the heuristic approach is 85.69% of that achieved by the ILP-based approach and 81.05% of that obtained by the MINLP-based approach, and the performance of the ILP-based approach is almost equivalent to that of the MINLP-based approach.