Energy-Efficient Data Reporting for Navigation in Position-Free Hybrid Wireless Sensor Networks

Hybrid wireless sensor network (HWSN) consists of static and mobile sensor nodes that work together for sensing and data collection in a region of interest. The static sensors detect events and send in situ notifications to the mobile node to come closer to the event to collect the data. It is challenging to the static nodes to send data packets to mobile nodes in position-free HWSN. The flood-based mechanism is commonly used in reporting data packets and supporting mobile node navigation. However, it causes energy consumption and minimizes lifetime of sensor network. In this paper, an energy-efficient packet reporting (EPR) scheme is proposed to report event packets in an energy-efficient manner. It aims at supporting mobile node navigation in position-free HWSN. EPR uses multi-metric energy-efficient-based relay node selection to send data downstream. Then, it uses transmission power adjustment strategy on the upstream sending nodes to reduce their energy consumption. In the case of multiple nodes detecting event around the same vicinity, a clustering strategy is used to send an aggregated data packet. Extensive simulations show that EPR provides superior improvements over the existing schemes.