Data collection point based mobile data gathering scheme with relay hop constraint

Various data gathering techniques using mobile collectors have been developed for energy saving in wireless sensor network. In the sensor field, a mobile collector may traverse within the transmission range of each sensor node to collect data directly from them without any relay. But as the velocity of a mobile collector is low, the data gathering latency may arises which is not desire for many time sensitive applications. To minimize data gathering latency, local data may be aggregated using multi hop transmissions and those collected data may be uploaded to the mobile collector. But, if the number of local relay hop is arbitrarily large then it may increase consumption of energy on packet relays and thus the overall efficiency of mobile data gathering may be reduced. Also, sensor has the limited buffer capacity to store data. So, the relay hop count should be constrained to a certain level to limit the energy consumption at sensors. In this work we have proposed a data collection point based approach that establishes a balance between the energy savings and data gathering latency, which makes an adjustment between the relay hop count for local data aggregation and the moving tour length of the mobile collector. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and provides better average relay hop count than other mobile data gathering schemes of same type.