  To meet the demands of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where data are usually
aggregated at a single source prior to transmitting to any distant user, there
is a need to establish a tree structure inside any given event region. In this
paper, we propose a novel technique to create one such tree, which preserves
the energy and minimizes the lifetime of event sources while they are
constantly transmitting for data aggregation in future WSNs. We use the term
Decentralized Lifetime-Minimizing Tree (DLMT) to denote this tree. DLMT
features in nodes with higher energy tend to be chosen as data aggregating
parents so that the time to detect the first broken tree link can be extended
and less energy is involved in tree maintenance. In addition, by constructing
the tree in such a way, the protocol is also able to reduce the frequency of
tree reconstruction, minimizes the amount of data loss, minimizes the delay
during data collection and preserves the energy. Forwarded directed Diffusion
protocol is chosen as the routing platform.
