Dynamic route construction for mobile collectors in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks with mobile data collectors have been recently proposed for extending the sensor network lifetime. Powerful mobile collectors are deployed to patrol the network and approach the static sensors for collecting their data buffers using single hop communication. The route followed by the mobile collector is very crucial for the data collection operation performed in the network and highly impacts the data collection time. This paper presents a practically efficient algorithm for constructing the mobile collector route. The route is constructed dynamically during the network operational time regardless of the sensors data generation rates. The algorithm acts on minimizing the sleeping time and the number of sensors waiting for the arrival of the mobile collector. Simulation results demonstrate that the presented algorithm can effectively reduce the overall data collection time.