Patrolling Mechanisms for Disconnected Targets in Wireless Mobile Data Mules Networks

This paper considers the target patrolling problem which asks a set of mobile data mules to efficiently patrol a set of given targets. Since the time interval (also referred to visiting interval) for consecutively visiting to each target reflects the monitoring quality of this target, the goal of this research is to minimize the maximal visiting interval. This paper firstly proposes a basic algorithm, called Basic (B-TCTP), which aims at constructing an efficient patrolling route for a number of given data mules such that the visiting intervals of all target points can be minimized. For the scenario containing weighted target points, a Weighted-TCTP (W-TCTP) algorithm is further proposed to satisfy the demand that targets with higher weights have higher data collection frequencies. By considering the energy constraint of each data mule, this paper additionally proposes a RW-TCTP algorithm which treats energy recharge station as a weighted target and arranges the data mules visiting the recharge station before exhausting their energies. Performance study demonstrates that the proposed algorithms outperform existing approaches in terms of visiting intervals of the given targets and length of patrolling path.