A Data Gathering Scheme for WSN/WSAN Based on Partitioning Algorithm and Mobile Sinks

Gathering data from sensors, mobile sink has been adopted in wireless sensor networks (WSN) and wireless sensor and actor network(WSAN) to achieve higher efficiency. With the help of mobile sink, sensors could attain a much longer lifetime than the past. However, mobile sink introduces new challenges such as large data gathering latency to WSN/WSAN. A lot of research efforts have been devoted to reduce the data gathering time. Cooperated with a novel partition algorithm, a concise and efficient data gathering scheme is proposed here. A given area can be divided into several zones with balanced data gathering latency. By modeling the partitioning problem as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), an algorithm is designed to balance the data gathering latency among all the zones. Then mobile sinks are assigned to these zones separately. The data could be gathered by these mobile sinks parallel thereupon. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate our proposed data gathering scheme. Different distribution patterns are considered. Effectiveness of our proposed data gathering scheme is proved by the simulation results.