Stream data gathering in wireless sensor networks within expected lifetime

Abstract

Sensor networks aim at collecting important sensor data for environment monitoring, e-health or hazardous conditions. Some applications do not need sensor networks with a long lifetime, such as monitoring an erupting volcano or monitoring hazardous conditions. These applications generally expect that sensor networks have reliable performance and provide continuous data streams during a short expected lifetime. In this work, we investigate the stream data gathering problem in sensor networks within an expected lifetime. Two important problems for stream data gathering are: 1) maximizing stream data gathering in wireless sensor networks within an expected lifetime; 2) minimizing transmission delay for stream data gathering in wireless sensor networks within an expected lifetime. The Maximum Stream Data Gathering (MSDG) algorithm and the Minimum Transmission Delay (MTD) algorithm are proposed to solve these two problems. Simulation results show that our algorithms can essentially solve the identified problems.