On the traversals of multiple mobile sinks in sensor networks

A class of applications involving wireless sensor networks requires more than one mobile sink to traverse through the sensor field to visit every sensor node in order to collect sensor data or to recharge the nodes or to calibrate the nodes. A natural problem arising in this scenario will be to accomplish the entire process in minimum time. Over some intrinsic assumptions, this problem is reduced to determining the paths of the mobile sinks where the maximum length path is minimised. A comprehensive exploration of problems of this class in the literature is considered. A heuristic approach is also provided for a specific instance of this problem where there are two mobile sinks. The performance of the heuristic is examined based on the experiments run and the paper concludes with some motivation for the extension of this work towards further research.