On Optimal Route Computation of Mobile Sink in a Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

There is evidence of a range of sensor networks applications where a mobile sink entity (node) is utilised for data collection from statically positioned sensor nodes in a sensor field. The mobile sink is typically required to cover the sensor field by physical motion in order to obtain the values from the sensor nodes in a periodic fashion. This characteristic leads to a very interesting problem of determining the optimal route of the mobile sink, in terms of distance travelled, to accomplish the data collection from all the sensor nodes. This minimum distance problem that is spanned from the design nature of the network has very intriguing and motivating connections with a set of classic computational problems. These cohesions and similarities are explored in this paper, and the computational complexity is analysed. The applicability of numerical solutions to the current problem is discussed and a numerical heuristic is provided to arrive at an approximate answer that is 'close' to the actual solution. An evaluation of the proposed approach is also provided through experimental results