Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are infrastructureless networks of tiny sensor motes which can sense from the environment and can transmit the sensed data through wireless communication. Generally, the transmission ranges of sensor nodes are limited and obstacles are present in the sensing area, so multi-hop communication by utilizing routing protocols is of utmost importance. Since the wireless transmission is prone to vulnerabilities such as eavesdropping and spoofing, monitoring the network traffic by secure points is a critical mission. In this paper, we propose breadth-first search tree (BFST) based vertex cover (VC) algorithms for routing and link monitoring in WSNs. BFST provides a shortest hop routing tree for WSNs and VC is a set of nodes for covering edges (communication links) of the network where it perfectly fits for network traffic monitoring. Unlike most existing algorithms which find minimal VC in a separate procedure, the proposed algorithms construct VC during the BFST establishment phase which leads to lower energy consumption for routing and link monitoring operations. We analyze the correctness proof of the algorithms along with the time, message, space, and bit complexities. We implement the proposed algorithms with their counterparts on a testbed of IRIS motes to evaluate their performances. We find through extensive evaluations from the IRIS testbed experiments and TinyOS simulations that the proposed algorithms find smaller VC sets with up to 3.1 times lower energy consumption than the existing distributed algorithms.

无线传感器网络（WSN）是微小传感器微粒的无基础设施网络，可以从环境中进行感应并可以通过无线通信传输感应到的数据。通常，传感器节点的传输范围是有限的，并且在传感区域中存在障碍，因此利用路由协议进行多跳通信至关重要。由于无线传输容易受到诸如窃听和欺骗之类的漏洞的影响，因此通过安全点监视网络流量是一项至关重要的任务。在本文中，我们提出了基于广度优先搜索树（BFST）的顶点覆盖（VC）算法，用于WSN中的路由和链路监视。BFST为WSN提供了最短的跳路由树，而VC是一组节点，用于覆盖网络的边缘（通信链路），非常适合网络流量监控。与大多数现有算法在单独的过程中找到最小VC的算法不同，所提出的算法在BFST建立阶段构造VC，从而降低了路由和链路监视操作的能耗。我们分析算法的正确性证明以及时间，消息，空间和位复杂度。我们在IRIS微粒的测试平台上与其他算法一起实施提出的算法，以评估其性能。通过对IRIS测试平台实验和TinyOS仿真的广泛评估，我们发现所提出的算法找到了最多3个较小的VC集。