Collection tree-oriented mesh routing optimization for extending the lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Routing optimization in wireless sensor networks facilitates to reduce the overhead of the maintaining of wireless sensor networks and extend the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Collection tree-based routing protocol, which does not require route discovery, has been widely used for low overheads of calculation and storage. However, with collection tree-based routing protocol, some nodes easily become the bottleneck points and quickly run out of the energy. To deal with this drawback, this article proposes a collection tree-oriented mesh routing strategy with cooperatively consuming the residual energy among the neighboring sensor nodes. The collection tree-oriented mesh routing is formulated into a linear programming problem with the purpose to maximize the network lifetime. By solving the optimization problem, the optimal mesh routing and data forwarding scheme is derived. Experimental simulations show that the proposed collection tree-oriented mesh routing optimization strategy can extend the network lifetime by more than 20%.