Shortening the Tour-Length of a Mobile Data Collector in the WSN by the Method of Linear Shortcut

In this work, we present a path-planning method for the Mobile Data Collector (MDC) in a wireless sensor network (WSN). In our method, a tour for the MDC is generated such that the latency of delivering data to the sink is reduced. We show that the TSP tour covers all the nodes of the WSN. However, the latency for the TSP tour may be prohibitively high for delay-sensitive real-time WSNs. We reduce the latency by shortening the given TSP tour using a method called Linear Shortcut. We observe that the MDC need not visit the exact location of the node. It only need to be in the proximity of the node as required by the transmission radius. We present an algorithm that iteratively shortens tour-length and hence, reduces the latency. We term the resulting tour as Tight Label Covering (TLC) tour. Experimental results show that TLC tour reduces latency by a significant margin.