  We are concerned with the problem of maximizing the worst-case lifetime of a
data-gathering wireless sensor network consisting of a set of sensor nodes
directly communicating with a base-station.We propose to solve this problem by
modeling sensor node and base-station communication as the interactive
communication between multiple correlated informants (sensor nodes) and a
recipient (base-station). We provide practical and scalable interactive
communication protocols for data gathering in sensor networks and demonstrate
their efficiency compared to traditional approaches.
  In this paper, we first develop a formalism to address the problem of
worst-case interactive communication between a set of multiple correlated
informants and a recipient. We realize that there can be different objectives
to achieve in such a communication scenario and compute the optimal number of
messages and bits exchanged to realize these objectives. Then, we propose to
adapt these results in the context of single-hop data-gathering sensor
networks. Finally, based on this proposed formalism, we propose a clustering
based communication protocol for large sensor networks and demonstrate its
superiority over a traditional clustering protocol.
