Joint routing and navigation protocols for data harvesting in sensor networks

This paper presents an integrated sink navigation and data routing framework called network-assisted data collection (NADC) in which optimum trajectories for a mobile data harvester (MDH) are computed such that a desired balance between energy-efficiency and collection delay is achieved. We have formulated the problem of mobile sink based data collection using a configurable knob (k) to find the desired balance. The key concept is to appropriately adjust the data routing and mobile sink trajectory by varying parameter k. The paper introduces a large slew of application scenarios with their unique optimization objectives, and demonstrates the relevance of the proposed framework in each such scenario. The notable solution components of NADC include a fully distributed and network assisted MDH navigation mechanism that does not rely on sensor localization services, and a multi-hop routing mechanism which works with the underlying sink navigation so that the sensor data can be aggregated and uploaded through dynamically chosen gateway nodes located around the sink trajectory.