Improving the Data Delivery Latency in Sensor Networks with Controlled Mobility

Unlike traditional multihop forwarding among homogeneous static sensor nodes, use of mobile devices for data collection in wireless sensor networks has recently been gathering more attention. It is known that the use of mobility significantly reduces the energy consumption at each sensor, elongating the functional lifetime of the network, in exchange for increased data delivery latency. However, in previous work, mobility and communication capabilities are often underutilized, resulting in suboptimal solutions incurring unnecessarily large latency. In this paper, we focus on the problem of finding an optimal path of a mobile device, which we call "data mule," to achieve the smallest data delivery latency in the case of minimum energy consumption at each sensor, i.e., each sensor only sends its data directly to the data mule. We formally define the path selection problem and show the problem is NP-hard. Then we present an approximation algorithm and analyze its approximation f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DCOSS
• Authors: Ryo Sugihara, Rajesh K. Gupta
• Keywords: Data Delivery Latency, DCOSS 2008, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Energy Consumption, Homogeneous Static Sensor