Data Gathering for Periodic Sensor Applications

In this paper we consider the problem of data gathering in wireless sensor network using Mobile Elements. In particular, we consider the situations where the data produced by the nodes must be delivered to the sink within a pre-defined time interval. Mobile elements travel the network and collect the data of nodes, and deliver them to the sink. Each node must be visited by a mobile element, which then must deliver this node data to the sink with the given time interval. The goal is to plan the tours of the mobile elements that minimize the total travelling time. Several variations of this problem have been investigated in the literature. We propose an algorithmic solution that outperforms that best known comparable scheme for this problem by an average of 40%.