MESTER: minimum energy spanning tree for efficient routing in wireless sensor networks

For applications requiring frequent data collections from a remote wireless sensor network, it is a challenging problem to design an efficient routing scheme for comprehensively, accurately and timely delivering data packets in each round of data collection over a long period of time. Unlike previous work targeting at maximizing energy efficiency and network lifetime, we propose and analyze in this paper a new routing scheme, called Minimum Energy Spanning Tree for Efficient Routing (MESTER), which is developed under the design objective of maintaining a high quality in data collection for as long as possible. Compared with the existing Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) based schemes like PEDAP and PEDAP-PA, MESTER can achieve comparable but more balanced performance at a much lower complexity. In addition, we define "throughput efficiency" to characterize our quality-oriented design objective. As a new concept with low granularity (packet level), throughput efficiency is found a fair and stable performance metric to different network sizes, node densities and routing schemes. It provides us an additional insight into the network behavior under different resource and capability constraints.