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Wireless sensor networks monitor specific areas through periodical data collecting mechanism, where sensor nodes sense information and forward data to Sink via multi-hop wireless communications. Since the timeliness of collecting data is of great importance to many applications, a low-latency data collection network structure (LDCNS) which minimizes delays in a data collection process is proposed in this paper. The LDCNS organizes sensor nodes into multiple multi-layered clusters. The size and structure of each cluster follow certain rules so that each cluster head can transmit data to Sink over a period of time which does not overlap with each other and these time periods are continuous. In the data collection process, there has always been a cluster head to transmit data to Sink. An energy-balanced algorithm (ENSF) is designed to construct the LDCNS, which considers the distances between nodes and Sink for choosing the cluster heads. Simulation results show that the LDCNS-ENSF scheme can shorten the duration of a data collection process and prolong the network lifetime when compared with other existing collection structures.

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