The tradeoff between transmission cost and network lifetime of data gathering tree in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is a critical issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and data gathering should be carefully designed to ensure high energy efficiency. In this work, we pay attention to two parts that are related to energy efficiency in WSN, which are transmission cost and network lifetime. In this work, network lifetime is defined as the time until the first node depletes its energy in the network. There is a tradeoff between transmission cost and network lifetime. When we reduce transmission cost, we usually increase the number of bottleneck nodes which are likely to soon deplete their energy as well, and thus reduce network lifetime. We prolong network lifetime at the cost of slightly increasing transmission cost to make a compromise between transmission cost and network lifetime. We apply compressive sensing (CS) to data gathering and take advantage of the zero elements in the sampling basis of CS to further reduce the transmission cost. We introduce a new concept of transmission vector and propose a novel method of constructing minimum transmission data gathering tree with low computation complexity. We also propose a high energy efficiency (HEE) algorithm to construct the data gathering tree with both low transmission cost and long network lifetime in this work. The simulation demonstrates that our algorithm has a good performance on the tradeoff between transmission cost and network lifetime.