Using Mobile Data Collectors to Enhance Energy Efficiency and Reliability in Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

A primary task in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is data collection. The main objective of this task is to collect sensor readings from sensor fields at predetermined sinks using routing protocols without conducting network processing at intermediate nodes, which have been proved as being inefficient in many research studies using a static sink. The major drawback is that sensor nodes near a data sink are prone to dissipate more energy power than those far away due to their role as relay nodes. Recently, novel WSN architectures based on mobile sinks and mobile relay nodes, which are able to move inside the region of a deployed WSN, which has been developed in most research works related to mobile WSN mainly exploit mobility to reduce and balance energy consumption to enhance communication reliability among sensor nodes. Our main purpose in this paper is to propose a solution to the problem of deploying mobile data collectors for alleviating the high traffic load and resulting bottleneck in a sink’s vicinity, which are caused by static approaches. For this reason, several WSNs based on mobile elements have been proposed. We studied two key issues in WSN mobility: the impact of the mobile element (sink or relay nodes) and the impact of the mobility model on WSN based on its performance expressed in terms of energy efficiency and reliability. We conducted an extensive set of simulation experiments. The results obtained reveal that the collection approach based on relay nodes and the mobility model based on stochastic perform better.