The high-level contribution of this paper is to illustrate the effectiveness of using graph theory tree traversal algorithms (pre-order, in-order and post-order traversals) to generate the chain of sensor nodes in the classical Power Efficient-Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) data aggregation protocol for wireless sensor networks. We first construct an undirected minimum-weight spanning tree (ud-MST) on a complete sensor network graph, wherein the weight of each edge is the Euclidean distance between the constituent nodes of the edge. A Breadth-First-Search of the ud-MST, starting with the node located closest to the center of the network, is now conducted to iteratively construct a rooted directed minimum-weight spanning tree (rd-MST). The three tree traversal algorithms are then executed on the rd-MST and the node sequence resulting from each of the traversals is used as the chain of nodes for the PEGASIS protocol. Simulation studies on PEGASIS conducted for both TDMA and CDMA systems illustrate that using the chain of nodes generated from the tree traversal algorithms, the node lifetime can improve as large as by 19%-30% and at the same time, the energy loss per node can be 19%-35% lower than that obtained with the currently used distance-based greedy heuristic.