Title: Flow-based scheme for time-constrained data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Authors: Khaled Almi'ani; Anastasios Viglas; Frans Schalekamp; Reza Abrishambaf

Addresses: Computer Science Department, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Ma'an 71111, Jordan ' School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia ' Department of Mathematics, The College of William & Mary, VA 23186, USA ' Department of Industrial Electronics, University of Minho, Guimarães 4800-058, Portugal

Abstract: We consider the problem of data gathering in a wireless sensor network using a single mobile element. The solution must involve a combination of a mobile element visiting a subset of the nodes (caching points), while other nodes communicate their data to the caching points in a multi-hop communication paradigm. The caching point nodes are selected with the aim of reducing the number of hops, a message originated from a node must travel to reach the nearest caching point. In this paper, we propose a flow-based algorithm that iteratively constructs the mobile element tour and the multi-hop routing trees. By transforming the topology of the network into maximum flow instance, our approach aims to construct its solution to reduce the overall traffic in the network. We evaluate our algorithm by comparing its performance with best comparable well-known algorithms from the literature.

Keywords: mobile data collection; path planning algorithms; flow-based algorithm; time constraints; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; multi-hop routing trees.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2016.075225

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2016 Vol.10 No.1, pp.1 - 12

Received: 19 Mar 2015
Accepted: 03 Jul 2015

Published online: 08 Mar 2016 *

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