Energy-Aware Transmission Scheduling in Mobile Sensor Networks

The great diversity of mobile sensor networks (MSNs) has emerged in different networks, including vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), and wireless body area networks (WBANs), which provide ubiquitous solutions for real-time monitoring. To prolong the network lifetime of MSNs, energy conservation for mobile sensors needs to be taken into consideration while we design the scheduling for MSNs. In this paper, we define the energy minimization problem for energy- aware transmission scheduling for MSNs, and prove that the problem is NP-hard. To have an optimal solution for the problem, we first formulate the problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, and then propose a greedy algorithm to approximate the solution of the ILP problem. We show that the computational complexity of the proposed greedy algorithm is low. We also propose a reporting mechanism to accommodate our greedy algorithm in MSNs. Simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed reporting mechanism. Our performance evaluation shows that our mechanism has the mobile sensors transmit real-time sensed data with less energy consumption.