Mobile Data Collection Networks for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy consumption is a major limitation of wireless sensor networks, with irreplaceable tiny sensors and multi-hop communication in sensor data aggregation as major contributors to this problem. While existing single hop data collection schemes reduce individual sensor energy consumption, they suffer from longer latency and low data delivery ratio. In face of these problems, we propose a mobile data collection network (MDCNet) as a new paradigm for wireless sensing applications. MDCNet is a fully self-deployed mesh network with virtual mesh nodes (mobile relay nodes), through which sensor data can be collected in a single hop and transmitted to the sinks. Our simulation results, based on NS-2, indicate that this new approach can achieve short latency and high data delivery ratio.