Energy aware and delay-tolerant data gathering in sensor networks with a mobile sink

Sink mobility has attracted much research interest in recent years because it can improve network performance such as prolonging network lifetime. In this paper, we consider the problem of prolonging network lifetime by employing a mobile sink for data gathering subject to a specified tolerant delay. To achieve that, we proposed a novel heuristic algorithm for finding a trajectory of the sink that strikes the trade-off between the latency of packet relay and the tour length of the mobile sink. Specifically, a subset of sensors will be selected as cluster heads that buffer cluster sensing data and forward the data to the mobile sink when it arrives. The cluster heads are selected with the constrains that any packet relay is bounded within a given number of hops and the relay energy consumption is lower than the residual energy of the cluster heads. We also conduct experiments by simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the SPT_DGA [13] significantly in terms of the network lifetime.