A Region-Based Reporting Scheme for Mobile Sensor Networks

The mobile sensor networks (MSNs) have been widely deployed to provide an ubiquitous solution for time-sensitive applications in a specific area with low deployment cost. The monitoring area of an MSN can be divided into several sensing regions (SRs). In an SR, the mobile sensor (MS) is responsible for reporting the sensed data to the sink node. For the time-sensitive applications on MSN, the time is divided into multiple monitoring periods (MPs). During every MP, a sensing report transmission in an SR is invalid if the sensing report is generated before the beginning of the MP. In this paper, we propose a region-based reporting mechanism, namely Energy-Efficient Distributed-Control Reporting (E²DCR) mechanism, for the MSNs. During every MP, the E²DCR mechanism attempts to have only one MS transmit the sensing report in an SR, and the other MSs in the same SR can stay in the sleep mode for power saving. Simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed mechanism. Our study shows that E²DCR can meet the delay constraint of the time-sensitive applications with less power consumption.