Realizing the full potential of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) highlights many design issues, particularly the trade-offs concerning multiple conflicting improvements such as maximizing the route overlapping for efficient data aggregation and minimizing the total link cost. While the issues of data aggregation routing protocols and link cost function in a WSNs have been comprehensively considered in the literature, a trade-off improvement between these two has not yet been addressed. In this paper, a comprehensive weight for trade-off between different objectives has been employed, the so-called weighted data aggregation routing strategy (WDARS) which aims to maximize the overlap routes for efficient data aggregation and link cost issues in cluster-based WSNs simultaneously. The proposed methodology is evaluated for energy consumption, network lifetime, throughput, and packet delivery ratio and compared with the InFRA and DRINA. These protocols are cluster-based routing protocols which only aim to maximize the overlap routes for efficient data aggregation. Analysis and simulation results revealed that the WDARS delivered a longer network lifetime with more proficient and reliable performance over other methods.
