Maximum-Lifetime Multi-Channel Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we consider the joint channel assignment and routing problem in multi-channel wireless sensor networks for maximizing the worst case network lifetime. We assume a data collection traffic pattern where all sensor nodes forward data to a centralized base station (sink). The proposed solutions lead to a tree rooted at the sink, comprising of sub-trees that operate over distinct channels. We prove that this channel assignment and routing problem is NP-complete, and present some distributed approaches as well as a centralized solutions. to address this problem. We perform extensive simulation studies that show that our proposed channel assignment and route selection schemes perform significantly better than random channel selection as well as a previously reported solution for the problem.