Optimal overlapping time partition in sensor networks with a path-constrained mobile sink

In dense sensor networks with a path-constrained mobile sink, the partition of overlapping communication time between nodes and the mobile sink may cause data disequilibrium among each node in the remote database, which will affect the evaluation and analysis of the interested information. To address this issue, this paper proposes an optimal partition scheme of overlapping time based on data equilibrium to minimize the variance of amount of data from each node. In order to implement the partition scheme, we design a communication protocol, in which the equilibrium information is diffused into the monitored area to control the data sensing process. Simulation experiments using OMNET++ show that our proposed scheme outperforms some baseline schemes in terms of data equilibrium.