Architecture of Wireless Sensor Networks With Mobile Sinks: Sparsely Deployed Sensors

In this paper, we propose to develop wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks (MSSNs). The proposed MSSN is highly energy efficient, because the multihop transmissions of high-volume data over the network are converted into single-hop transmissions. We focus our investigation on sparsely deployed networks, where single node-to-sink transmission is considered. The transmission-scheduling algorithm (TSA-MSSN) is proposed, where a parameter is employed to control the tradeoff between the maximization of the probability of successful information retrieval and the minimization of the energy-consumption cost. It is shown that the proposed implementation of the TSA-MSSN has a complexity of O(1). This paper serves as the foundation for understanding fundamental laws behind the aforementioned tradeoff with useful implications for the design of more complex MSSNs.