Lightweight mobile data gathering strategy for wireless sensor networks

Most routing solutions for wireless sensor networks utilize static sinks to collect data from the entire network. This approach results in high traffic load at nodes located near the sink. These sensor nodes will be more requested than other nodes in the network, resulting in longer delays and packet losses. In this paper, we propose a mobile data collector strategy in order to alleviate the high traffic load and resulting bottleneck in a sinkpsilas vicinity caused by static approaches. Our proposed protocol employs mobile entities that periodically broadcast beacons. Once a sensor nodes receives a beacon, it decides whether or not to join the cluster based on hop levels. The beaconpsilas signal strength is used in order to perform a simple but efficient route re-configuration. An extensive set of simulation experiments is conducted and results confirm that the introduction of mobile data collectors in wireless sensor networks reduces the bottleneck at the nodes closer to the sink. Our proposed mobility technique for data gathering introduces no traffic or energy overhead. In addition, it significantly reduces packet delivery delay.