Message Ferry Routing Algorithm for Data Collection in Partitioned and Buffer-Limited Wireless Sensor Networks

In some particular environments such as battlefield, disaster recovery and wide area surveillance, most existing routing algorithms will fail to deliver messages to their destinations. Thus, it is an important research issue of how to deliver data in disconnected wireless sensor networks. This paper presents two efficient message ferry routing algorithms, denoted as MFRA1 and MFRA2, for data collection in disconnected wireless sensor networks. Both algorithms are designed to find feasible routes for the message ferry such that the buffers of sensors will not overflow after a complete sequence. A complete sequence is the visit sequence of message ferry which visits every sensor node at least once. We find the shortest sequence for message ferry which visits every sensor exactly once and then we check the feasibility of the visit sequence. If there is a sensor overflow, MFRA1 and MFRA2 fix the overflow by partitioning the initial visit sequence into some sub-sequences such that the ferry visits the overflow node twice in the resulting sequence. The above process will continue until a feasible solution is found. Simulation results show that both MFRA1 and MFRA2 are better than other schemes in terms of the amount of data lost, because the other schemes neglect the case of sensor overflow.