Performance Evaluation of MULE and SENMA Models for Strip-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are group of low powered tiny sensors which have capability to sense different environmental data. The data sensed by the source nodes is forwarded to the base station via sink with minimal energy consumption and low communication cost. Recent approaches focuses on using Mobile Data Collectors (MDC) for data collection in WSNs to improve the lifetime of the network. MDC has two main advantages over the static sinks for data collection: (i) it can travel spatially separated geographical regions for data collection (ii) it requires minimal energy for its operation. Using MDC's there are two main models for data collection and they are: data mule (MULE), and sensor network with mobile access point (SENMA). MULE is an multi hop approach while SENMA is single-hop approach. The challenges for strip based network model is not addressed even though the basic architectures for MULE and SENMA have been well studied. This paper determines the average energy consumption of a node for strip based MDC through analytical approaches. The simulation results compares both the models for energy consumption and addresses the trade offs between energy and network sizes.