Mobility to Improve the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks: a Theoretical Framework

Although commonly considered as a harm in wireless networks, mobility can potentially be beneficial to wireless sensor networks that usually consist of static nodes. A recent boom of applying mobile devices to improve the lifetime of wireless sensor networks has lead to a great deal of meaningful contributions, both in theory and practice. In this paper, we survey the efforts relevant to this topic. In addition, we also identify the lack of theoretical understanding of one of the approaches, namely mobile sink. We hence briefly describe a theoretical framework that we have obtained recently; it aims at bringing deeper insight on the optimal way of using mobile sinks for lifetime improvement.