Data collection using rendezvous points and mobile actor in wireless sensor networks

In this paper we present a new data collection scheme using mobile actors in a large scale wireless sensor network (WSN). A mobile actor, or for convenience, M-actor is a mobile node that has powerful energy source, computation, and communication features. The mobile node is able to move freely through the sensor deployment, traversing through the radio transmission range of wireless sensor nodes to collect the sensed data. Once data from all sensors is collected, the M-actor returns to the base station to off-load the collected data. This paper makes two contributions. First, we present a heuristic to compute collection points, referred to as the rendezvous points (RPs). These points are computed such that full coverage is guaranteed. Second, the optimal path for the M-actor is modeled using a genetic algorithm (GA)based traveling salesman problem (TSP). The proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significant improvement in reducing the tour length for the M-actor when compared with other schemes.