Packet Transmission Scheduling Algorithm for Dense Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

A transmission scheduling algorithm is proposed for wireless sensor networks with high node densities, where a mobile sink is responsible for collecting the information from the sensor nodes with similar observations as well as determining the best transmission strategy. The proposed optimal algorithm and the reduced complexity algorithm are based on the well known tradeoff between the energy consumption and the probability of successful packet arrival at the sink, when the sensor nodes need to share a single transmission channel at each time slot. When the algorithm is used for transmission scheduling, it is advantageous in terms of power consumption and successful packet transmission rate for networks with higher node densities. Moreover, the effect of the cost of transmission power at the sink is studied for different node densities. It is shown that as we increase the cost of power at the sink, the transmission power at the nodes is dynamically adjusted in a way that keeps the average number of transmitted packets high.