A Virtual-grid farmland data-gathering locations decision algorithm for the mobile sink in wireless sensor network

The wireless sensor networks are applied to farmland for achieving unmanned agriculture and improving the grain production. The primary task is collecting the data of the deployed sensors using a mobile sink. This paper proposes a virtual-grid method to determine the visiting locations of the mobile sink in a farmland. The virtual grids with higher scores are selected as the candidate visiting locations. A redundant-locations elimination algorithm which uses set-conjunction operations is also proposed for reducing the unnecessary visiting locations. Simulation results show that the proposed virtual-grid method can effectively reduce the number of visiting locations about 15%-20% than the cluster-centroid method which uses the centroid position of a group deployed sensors as the visiting location for mobile sink.