The use of a mobile sink for quality data collection in energy harvesting sensor networks

In this paper we study data collection in an energy harvesting sensor network where sensors are deployed along a given path and a mobile sink travels along the path periodically for data collection. Such a typical application scenario is to employ a mobile vehicle for traffic surveillance of a given highway. As the sensors in this network are powered by renewable energy sources, the time-varying characteristics of energy harvesting poses great challenges on the design of efficient routing protocols for data collection in harvesting sensor networks. In this paper we first formulate a novel optimization problem as a network utility maximization problem, by incorporating multi-rate communication mechanism between sensors and the mobile sink and show the NP-hardness of the problem. We then devise a novel centralized algorithm for it, assuming that the global knowledge of the entire network is available. We also develop a distributed solution to the problem without the global knowledge assumption. We finally conduct extensive experiments by simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising and very efficient.