Communication Availability-Based Scheduling for Fair Data Collection with Path-Constrained Mobile Sink in Wireless Sensor Networks

To effectively transfer sensing data to a sink node, system designers should consider the characteristic of wireless sensor networks in the way of data transmission. In particular, sensor nodes surrounding a fixed sink node have routinely suffered from concentrated network traffic so that their battery energy is rapidly exhausted. The lifetime of wireless sensor networks decreases due to the rapid power consumption of these sensor nodes. To address the problem, a mobile sink model has recently been chosen for traffic load distribution among sensor nodes. However, since a mobile sink continuously changes its location in sensor networks, it has a time limitation to communicate with each sensor node and unstable signal strength from each sensor node. Therefore, fair and stable data collection policy between a mobile sink and sensor nodes is necessary in this circumstance. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling policy to support fair and stable data collection for a mobile sink in wireless sensor networks. The proposed policy performs data collection scheduling based on the communication availability of data transmission between sensor nodes and a mobile sink.