Modeling Mobility-Assisted Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Exploiting mobility to enhance the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), in terms of connectivity, coverage, and lifetime elongation, has recently been the focus of several research studies. Mobility was adopted in two different ways; either using a network of mobile sensor nodes or deploying a few supplementary special mobile elements, usually referred to as mobile agents to help enhance connectivity and coverage. Different modes of operation (roles) were assigned to mobile agents including being a data relay, data collector, and data sink. In this paper we use a closed queueing network to model mobility and then evaluate data latency under all those roles. The proposed model provides powerful means to understand the effect of different parameters, like velocity and number of mobile agents as well as their movement strategy, on data latency.