Data collection is one of the paramount concerns in wireless sensor networks. Many data collection algorithms have been proposed for collecting data in particular monitoring regions. However, the efficiency of the paths for such data collection can be improved. This paper proposes an energy-aware path construction (EAPC) algorithm, which selects an appropriate set of data collection points, constructs a data collection path, and collects data from the points burdened with data. EAPC is intended to prolong the network lifetime, it accounts for the path cost from its current data collection point to the next point and the forwarding load of each sensor node. Performance evaluation reveals that the proposed EAPC has more efficient performance than existing data collection mechanisms in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, fairness index, and efficiency index.
