A Survey on Mobility-Assisted Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Collecting data from spatially distributed sensor nodes is a generic form of sensor network applications. Multihop forwarding has been broadly used for this purpose, but it could be inefficient in terms of energy consumption, especially when the nodes are deployed sparsely. On the other hand, using a mobile device (often referred as a "mobile element") to traverse the sensor field and collect data from each sensor is an alternative approach. This mobility-assisted approach significantly reduces energy consumption at each node. However, a downside of this approach is an increased data delivery latency, and thus we should optimize the motion of data mule so that we can minimize the latency. In this paper, we survey the existing work on the mobility-assisted data collection by classifying them into three categories based on the mobility exploited: the random mobility, the predictable mobility, and the controlled mobility. We also highlight several open problems on this topic.