Mobile Relay Configuration in Data-Intensive Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly used in data-intensive applications such as micro-climate monitoring, precision agriculture, and audio/video surveillance. A key challenge faced by data-intensive WSNs is to transmit all the data generated within an application’s lifetime to the base station despite the fact that sensor nodes have limited power supplies. We propose using low-cost disposable mobile relays to reduce the energy consumption of data-intensive WSNs. Our approach differs from previous work in two main aspects. First, it does not require complex motion planning of mobile nodes, so it can be implemented on a number of low-cost mobile sensor platforms. Second, we integrate the energy consumption due to both mobility and wireless transmissions into a holistic optimization framework. Our framework consists of three main algorithms. The first algorithm computes an optimal routing tree assuming no nodes can move. The second algorithm improves the topology of the routing tree by greedily adding new nodes exploiting mobility of the newly added nodes. The third algorithm improves the routing tree by relocating its nodes without changing its topology. This iterative algorithm converges on the optimal position for each node given the constraint that the routing tree topology does not change. We present efficient distributed implementations for each algorithm that require only limited localized synchronization. Because we do not necessarily compute an optimal topology, our final routing tree is not necessarily optimal. However, our simulation results show that our algorithms significantly outperform the best existing solutions.