Exploiting Mobility for Energy Efficient Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

The authors analyze an architecture based on mobility to address the problem of energy efficient data collection in a sensor network. The approach exploits mobile nodes present in the sensor field as forwarding agents. As a mobile node moves in close proximity to sensors, data is transferred to the mobile node for later depositing at the destination. They present an analytical model to understand the key performance metrics such as data transfer, latency to the destination, and power. Parameters for the model include: sensor buffer size, data generation rate, radio characteristics, and mobility patterns of mobile nodes. Through simulation they verify the model and show that the approach can provide substantial savings in energy as compared to the traditional ad-hoc network approach.