Msct: an Efficient Data Collection Heuristic for Wireless Sensor Networks With Limited Sensor Memory Capacity

Abstract

Sensors used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have mostly limited capacity which affects the performance of their applications. One of the data-gathering methods is to use mobile sinks to visit these sensors so that they can save their limited battery energies from forwarding data packages to static sinks. The main disadvantage of employing mobile sinks is the delay of data collection due to relative low speed of mobile sinks. Since sensors have very limited memory capacities, whenever a mobile sink is too late to visit a sensor, that sensor's memory would be full, which is called a 'memory overflow', and thus, needs to be purged, which causes loss of collected data. In this work, a method is proposed to generate mobile sink tours, such that the number of overflows and the amount of lost data are minimized. Moreover, the proposed method does not need either the sensor locations or sensor memory status in advance. Hence, the overhead stemmed from the information exchange of these requirements are avoided. The proposed method is compared with a previously published heuristic. The simulation experiment results show the success of the proposed method over the rival heuristic with respect to the considered metrics under various parameters.