Efficient data gathering using mobile elements in partially connected sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are usually densely-deployed, while sparse sensor networks have emerged as a special class of sensor networks in recent studies which created a number of new challenges. Relaying data using mobile elements seems an effective way for data gathering in such networks. In this paper, we propose two grid-based mobile element scheduling (GBMES) schemes that schedule a mobile element (ME) to periodically gather data from a partially connected sensor network. As shown in simulations, the GBMES schemes perform well on avoiding data loss due to buffer overflow of sensor nodes.