Mobile relay configuration in data-intensive Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become increasingly available for data-intensive applications such as micro-climate monitoring, precision agriculture, and audio/video surveillance. A key challenge faced by data-intensive WSNs is to transmit the sheer amount of data generated within an application's lifetime to the base station despite the fact that sensor nodes have limited power supplies such as batteries or small solar panels. In this paper, we propose to use low-cost disposable mobile relays to reduce the energy consumption of data-intensive WSNs. Different from previous work, our approach does not require complex motion planning of mobile nodes, and hence can be implemented on a number of low-cost mobile sensor platforms. Moreover, we integrate the energy consumption due to both mobility and wireless transmissions into a holistic optimization framework. The optimal relay configuration is shown to depend on both the positions of nodes and the amount of data to be sent. We develop two algorithms that iteratively refine the configuration of mobile relays and converge to the optimal solution. These algorithms have efficient distributed implementations that do not require explicit synchronization. Our simulation results based on realistic energy models obtained from existing mobile and static sensor platforms show that our algorithms significantly outperform the best existing solutions.