Adaptative Delay Aware Data Gathering Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Extending the network lifetime is a challenging problem in wireless sensor networks. Using additional mobile agents called data collectors in order to gather data from sensor nodes and carry them to the sink, reveals a convenient solution. Intuitively, a great sensor nodes energy conservation can be achieved by single hop data gathering strategies. However, these strategies may lead to significantly increase the data latency in the network. Previous studies propose to introduce local relay transmissions in order to reduce the data gathering time. Most of these strategies rely on a static parameter in order to choose the data collector trajectory. In this paper, we focus on a novel data gathering strategy that aims at dynamically selecting the data collector trajectory according to the required data delivery delay deadline. In other words, the data collector may change its trajectory according to the urgency of the gathered data. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm for coloring the network area into red and green disks, according to the delay deadline required by the sensor nodes. Only the red disks must be visited during a tour of the data collector. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms static cluster based gathering strategies by efficiently adapting the tolerated data latency to the consumed energy rate.