  Routing is one of the critical and ongoing challenges in Wireless Sensor
Networks. The main challenge has always been to have a routing protocol that
reduces the communication overhead, hence saving the energy of the sensors in
the network. Hierarchical routing protocols are known to be the most
energy-efficient routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks. In this paper,
a more generalized hierarchical routing protocol is introduced for Wireless
Sensor Network, which is based on tree data structures. The clustering in the
proposed protocol has the format of a general tree, which is constructed in an
adaptive manner based on the distance of the sensors. Results show that the
proposed tree-based protocol introduces a significant benefit in energy
consumption and lifetime of the network over the existing hierarchical
approaches.
