On the Mathematical Nature of Wireless Broadcast Trees

Trees are arguably one of the most important data structures widely used in information theory and computing science. Different numbers of intermediate nodes in wireless broadcast trees may exert great impacts on the energy consumption of individual nodes, which are typically equipped with a limited power supply in a wireless sensor network; this limitation may eventually determine how long the given wireless sensor network can last. Thus, obtaining a deep understanding of the mathematical nature of wireless broadcast trees is of great importance. In this paper, we give new proof of Cayley’s well-known theorem for counting labeled trees. A distinct feature of this proof is that we purely use combinatorial structures instead of constructing a bijection between two kinds of labeled trees, which is in contrast to all existing proofs. Another contribution of this work is the presentation of a new theorem on trees based on the number of intermediate nodes in the tree. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to present a tree enumeration theorem based on the number of intermediate nodes in the tree.