The maximum lifetime data aggregation problem is to maximize the network lifetime as minimizing the transmission energy of all deployed nodes in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a simulated annealing algorithm to solve efficiently the maximum lifetime data aggregation problem on the basis of meta-heuristic approach in wireless sensor networks. In order to make a search more efficient, we propose a novel neighborhood generating method and a repair function of the proposed algorithm. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other existing algorithms through some experiments in terms of the network lifetime and algorithm computation time. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient for the maximum lifetime data aggregation problem in wireless sensor networks.