Energy Efficient Data Collection Scheme in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensors typically aim to transmit their own readings to the sink node. Constructing an efficient data collection tree is very important since it can determine the lifetime of the given WSNs. In literature, may studies have investigated this issue and proposed algorithms for mobile sink to visit each sensor such that the readings of the sensors can be directly transmit to the WSN. However, visiting each sensor is time consuming which results in long path for mobile sink to pass through each sensor. Consequently, the time period between the consecutive two visits to the same sensor is long, leading to the situation of sensor buffer overflow. This paper aims to propose an efficient data collection mechanism which chooses a set of sensors to play the role of the rendezvous points (RPs) which would be visited by the mobile sink. The proposed mechanism will select important sensors as the RPs and construct an efficient path for mobile sink to collect data. Those sensors that are not visited by the mobile sink will forward their readings to the nearest RP and then the RP can relay their information to the mobile sink when it is visited. Performance results show that the proposed mechanism is better than the existing studies and significantly reduce the time period between two consecutive visits.