Mobility for an Optimal Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor nodes located in the vicinity of a static sink drain rapidly their batteries since they have to carry more traffic burden. This situation results in network partition, holes as well as data losses. To mitigate this issue, many research proposed the use of mobile sink in data collection as a potential solution. However, due to its speed, the mobile sink has very short communication time to pick up all data from the sensor nodes within the network, therefore the sink is forced to return back to gather the remaining data. In this paper, we propose a new data collection scheme that aims to decrease the latency and enlarge the staying time between the mobile sink and the meeting points that buffer data originated from the other sensor nodes. We have also handled the case of urgent data so that they can be delivered without any delay. Our proposed scheme is validated via extensive simulations using NS2 simulator. Our approach significantly decreases the latency and prolongs the contact time between the mobile sink and sensor nodes. Keywords—Contact time; mobile sink; wireless sensor networks; meeting point; data gathering