Multi-track Mobile Data Collection Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely researched by countries and institutes. The limited node energy has already become a constraint of large-scale applications. Seeking the energybalance features at sensor nodes to prolong the network lifetime, a multi-track mobile data collecting mechanism (MTMDC) was proposed in this paper. The MTMDC mechanism was composed of three major phases: the Nodes Estimation Phase, the Energy Estimation Phase and the Multi-track Energy-balance Phase. Based on the three phases, a data collection path for mobile data collector or mobile sink (MS) was built to balance the energy consume of the sensor nodes. Theoretical analysis and performance simulations indicated that the proposed MTMDC mechanism has prominent features compared with the existing approaches in terms of the energy-balance performance and network lifetime.