Communication Techniques for Mobile Sensor Networks

In mobile sensor networks (MSNs), since sensor nodes and wireless networks are highly resource constrained, and it is highly required to manage sensor data in flexible and efficient manners. Under the MEXT research project. The Grand-in-Aid Scientific Research (S)(21220002) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan entitled "Studies on Efficient Data Processing Techniques for Mobile Sensor Networks," we have conducted researches on data management in MSNs. In this paper, we report some of our achievements in a sub-area of this project, which mainly addresses communication protocols for efficient data gathering in MSNs. In particular, we first show our achievements on how to efficiently gather sensor data using mobile sensor nodes in each of sparse and dense environments. We also show our another achievement on how to transmit sensor data assuming an environment where multiple mobile sinks exist.