Mobile access coordinated wireless sensor networks — Topology design and throughput analysis

In this paper, we propose a novel mobile access coordinated wireless sensor network (MC-WSN) architecture for reliable and efficient information exchange. In conventional sensor networks with mobile access points (SENMA), the mobile access points (MAs) traverse the network to collect information directly from individual sensors. While simplifying the routing process, a major limitation with SENMA is that a transmission is made only if an MA visits the corresponding source node; thus, data transmission is limited by the physical speed of the MAs and the length of their trajectory, resulting in low throughput and huge delay. The proposed MC-WSN architecture resolves this problem and provides an efficient solution for time-sensitive information exchange. In MC-WSN, the delay is effectively managed through hop number control. We analyze the throughput of the network, and show that the throughput of the MC-WSN is independent of the physical speed or the trajectory length of the mobile access point. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through simulations.