A Mobile-Sink-Based Packet Transmission Scheduling Algorithm for Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

A transmission scheduling algorithm is proposed for wireless sensor networks with high node densities, where a mobile sink is responsible for gathering the data packets from the sensor nodes with similar observations. The proposed algorithm is based on the well-known tradeoff between the energy consumption and the probability of successful packet arrival at the sink, when the sensor nodes need to share a single transmission channel at each time slot. An optimal algorithm along with two reduced-complexity algorithms are introduced, where the new data packets generated by the sensor nodes are incorporated in the model. The simulation results indicate that, when the algorithm is used for transmission scheduling, it is advantageous in terms of power consumption and successful packet transmission rate for networks with higher node densities.