The design of an effective and robust data gathering algorithm is crucial to the overall performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, using traditional routing algorithms for data gathering is energy-inefficient for sensor nodes with limited power resources and multi-hop communication protocols. Data gathering with mobile sinks provided an effective solution to this problem. The major drawback of this approach is the time and path constraints of the mobile sink, which limit the mobile sink to collect data from all sensor nodes and, then, data routing is still required for these unreachable parts by the mobile sink. This paper presents a new data gathering algorithm called Connectivity-Based Data Collection (CBDC). The CBDC algorithm utilizes the connectivity between sensor nodes so as to determine the trajectory of the mobile sink whilst satisfying its path constraint and minimizing the number of multi-hop communications. The presented results show that CBDC, in comparison with the LEACH-C algorithm, prolongs the network life time at different connectivity levels of sensor networks, varying number of sensor nodes and at different path constraints of the mobile sink.
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