Controlled Vs. Uncontrolled Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks: Some Performance Insights

Among the many ways of improving the performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) in terms of crucial metrics such as its lifetime and data latency, exploiting the mobility of some of the network components has been recently observed to be among the most promising. In this paper we demonstrate how two very different schemes for WSN mobility leads to different benefits for network performance. More specifically, we consider the data MULEs kind of random, uncontrolled mobility with single-hop data collection and we compare it with the controllable mobility of the data collection point (sink) where sensor-to-sink data routing follows multi-hop paths. Through quite thorough ns2-based simulations we show that data MULEs are to be used in those WSNs deployed for delay tolerant applications. Benefits of this scheme include low energy consumption and easier protocol and nodal design. Data latency, however, can be unbearably high. We therefore show that a good tradeoff between network lifetime gains and data latency increases can be obtained by using those solutions where the mobility of the sink is controlled by the network conditions.