Mobility Assisted Data Gathering in heterogeneous energy replenishable wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks adopting static data gathering may suffer from unbalanced energy consumption due to non-uniform packet relay in such networks, especially in large scale networks. On the other hand, although mobile data gathering provides a reasonable approach to solving this problem, it inevitably introduces longer data collection latency due to the use of mobile data collectors. In the meanwhile, energy harvesting has been considered as a promising solution to relieve energy limitation in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we consider a joint design of these two schemes and propose a novel two layer heterogeneous architecture for wireless sensor networks, which consists of two types of nodes: sensor nodes which are static and powered by solar panels, and cluster heads that have limited mobility and can be wirelessly recharged by power transporters. Based on this network architecture, we present a data gathering scheme, called Mobility Assisted Data Gathering (MADG), where sensor nodes are clustered around cluster heads that change their positions in each data gathering cycle, and the sensing data are forwarded to the data sink by these cluster heads working as data aggregation points. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by extensive simulations and the results show that MADG provides significant improvement in terms of balancing energy consumption and the amount data gathered compared to previous work.