Region Based Scheduling With Multiple Mobile Robots for Data Collection Strategies in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data collection process is one of the important aspects in the design consideration for future analysis in wireless sensor networks. Energy consumption by parent node increases due to continuous forwarding of sensed data from their respective child nodes especially in the tree based topology. Once the energy in the parent nodes was completely drained off, some of the child nodes get isolated/ partitioned from the sink node. The proposed data collection method involves deployment of multiple mobile robots whose responsibility is to collect the data from the nodes whose energy is below the threshold value. Navigation of mobile robots to collect the data from partitioned nodes usually achieved by time and location based strategies. In proposed hybrid scheduling, the navigation of mobile robots scheduled by both the combination of time and location based approaches with multiple region scheduling. In large network scenario, the mobile robot gets more burdens due to its more responsibilities to visit all partitioned nodes. So the entire scenario is divided in to different regions and the deployment of multiple mobile robots is based on the requirements. Therefore, the efficiency of sensed data collected by the base station or sink node from partitioned/islanded WSN is improved doubly using multiple mobile robots. Through simulation under the environment of NS-2 simulator, the results from various aspects show that proposed multiple mobile robots can improve the performance of collecting the sensed data in large-scale sensing fields and also it improves the lifetime of the sensor nodes.