Efficient Data Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks with Ubiquitous Mobile Data Collectors

Usually, sensor data needs to be disseminated from the source sensors to data collectors (e.g., sink nodes), making those spatially distributed sensor data available for applications to access. The widespread and ubiquitous nature of mobile devices, e.g., PDAs and cell phones around the world, makes them attractive to be used as mobile data collectors (MDCs) to collect and deliver the sensor data. The goal of this work is to design a dissemination protocol that leads to efficient data delivery from the source sensors to ubiquitous MDCs. We propose the Wait-Focus-Spray (WFS) scheme for wireless sensor networks with ubiquitous MDCs. The main objective of WFS is to balance the data delivery latency and transmission overhead when considering the existence of ubiquitous MDCs. In WFS, we also propose a corresponding mechanism-probabilistic scattered binary spraying (PSBS), to reduce the spatial redundancy when spraying data copies, which can increase the probability of meeting a MDC. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our WFS scheme reduces the transmission cost per message while provides comparable delivery delay compared with the existing work.