We analyze the impact of the structure of the Data Gathering (DG) trees on node lifetime (round of first node failure) and network lifetime (minimum number of rounds by which the network gets either disconnected due to node failures or the fraction of coverage loss reaches a threshold) in wireless sensor networks through extensive simulations. The two categories of DG trees studied are: the Bottleneck Node Weight-Based (BNW-DG) trees and Bottleneck Link Weight-Based (BLW-DG) trees. The BNW-DG trees incur a smaller diameter and a significantly larger fraction of nodes as leaf nodes: thus, protecting a majority of the nodes in the network from simultaneously being exhausted of the energy resources (contributing to a significantly larger network lifetime); nevertheless the nodes that serve as intermediate nodes in the first few instances of the BNW-DG trees are bound to lose their energy more quickly than the other nodes, leading to a smaller node lifetime compared to that of the BLW-DG trees (that incur a larger diameter and a relatively lower fraction of nodes as leaf nodes).
