Title: Tour and path planning methods for efficient data gathering using mobile elements

Authors: Khaled Almi'ani; Anastasios Viglas; Lavy Libman

Addresses: Computer Science Department, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Ma'an 71111, Jordan ' School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia ' School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales and NICTA, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia

Abstract: We consider a well-established model of data gathering in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that combines mobile elements visiting some of the nodes, and wireless communication from the rest. Since wireless communication impacts the life-time of the network, there is a need to design the mobile element path so that the required communication is minimised, while the path length is bounded in length. Based on the required structure of the tour we investigate two variations of this problem. First, we consider mobile element tours that start and end at a predefined sink. Then we consider the unrestricted case, where the path is not required to return to the predefined sink node. We propose new algorithms that alternate between the path design and the multi-hop wireless communication routes, and iteratively improve the out-come of each phase. We compare the resulting performance of our algorithms with the best known comparable schemes in the literature.

Keywords: mobile data collection; path planning algorithms; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; mobile element tours; network lifetime.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2016.074386

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2016 Vol.21 No.1, pp.11 - 25

Received: 05 Jun 2013
Accepted: 03 Mar 2014
Published online: 27 Jan 2016 *

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