Reducing the Path Length of a Mobile BS in WSNs

Recent research shows that the node energy in WSNs can be significantly saved by integrating mobile BS into the network, which is capable of collecting data from sensor nodes. However, the mobile BS may aggravate the latency problem of the network, and thus hinder its use. Rendezvous points are a subset of nodes that buffer data from other sensor nodes, and transfer the buffered data to mobile BS. The locations that the mobile BS must arrive in order to collect all the data from the WSN are called the stop points. Reduction in the number of stop points can serve as a balance between network energy saving and network latency. In this paper, we propose a stop points reducing algorithm, which can get the smallest stop point set in sensor networks while guarantees the coverage of the entire network. The algorithm is verified by extensive experiments.