Energy-efficient data collection in WSN-MCN convergence architecture

Recent, mobile sink has been exploited for data gathering to reduce and balance energy expenditure among sensors. Most of previous works are dedicated to look for a shortest path to the mobile sink regardless of the heavy signaling overhead and high latency caused by the frequent updating of topology and routing. Moreover, in most use cases, there is no necessary to frequently collect data from the same sensors. In this paper, we propose an Energy-Efficient Data Collection Scheme (E2DCS) in a converged WSN and mobile cellular network (MCN) scenario. The user equipment (UE) acts as a mobile sink to activate the sensors for data collection/transmission while keeping the topology and routing unchanged. Data validity period is introduced to avoid repeatedly collecting data from the same sensors. By adopting the E2DCS, only necessary sensors should be activated for data collection or transmission while the other sensors could keep sleeping to save energy. Simulation results demonstrate that the E2DCS activates much fewer sensors compared to other existing.