A Sensor Data Collection Method with a Mobile Sink for Communication Traffic Reduction by Delivering Predicted Values

Recently, many studies exploit mobile sinks to collect sensor data for environmental observations or weather forecasting. Mobile sinks travel in sensing areas and collect data directly from each sensor. By using mobile sinks, we can reduce communication traffic further than that for the case of constructing sensor networks. However, in many methods, the mobile sink collects data from all sensors that the mobile sink can communicate with. This causes much communication traffic and interferes with other communications. In this paper, we propose a communication traffic reduction method by delivering predicted sensor data. In our proposed method, the mobile sink broadcasts predicted sensor data to each sensor. Only sensors whose sensing data exceeds the admissible error margin from the predicted sensor data transmit their data. Therefore, the communication traffic can be reduced. The evaluation results demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method.