TAPEMAN: Towards an Optimal Data Gathering Mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we study the lifetime optimization problem using a mobile sink node in a storage-constrained wireless sensor network, and propose an optimal data gathering mechanism named (TAPEMAN) which runs in three steps: first a tight upper bound of the network lifetime is derived through analysis of energy consumption, then we generate a Traveling salesman problem (TSP) solution based on a 2-approximation
$O(n^{2})$
algorithm. A judgment will be made about whether this solution is optimal. If the answer is yes, TAPEMAN terminates. If not, a novel data diffusion scheme is used to distribute data to neighboring nodes, in order to avoid data leaking. We prove that under some reasonable assumptions, our algorithm can achieve this upperbound. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed solution and substantiate the importance of using sink mobility for energy-constrained sensor networks.