Modeling Mobility-Assisted Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Exploiting mobility to enhance the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in terms of connectivity, coverage, and lifetime elongation, has recently been the focus of several research studies. Mobility was adopted in two different ways; either using a network of mobile sensor nodes or deploying a few supplementary special mobile elements, usually referred to as mobile agents to help enhance connectivity and coverage. Different modes of operation (roles) were assigned to mobile agents including being a data relay, data collector, and data sink.