Data gathering using mobile agents in dense mobile wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, there has been increasing interest in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs) that are constructed by mobile sensor nodes held by ordinary people, which has led to a new concept called urban sensing. In such MWSNs, mobile sensor nodes densely exist, and thus, there are basically many sensor nodes for each geographical point that can sense the point in the entire sensing area. To reduce the communication cost for sensing operations, it is desirable to gather the sensor data from the minimum number of the mobile sensor nodes which are necessary to guarantee the sensing coverage or the quality of services. In this paper, to achieve this, we propose a data gathering method using mobile agents in dense MWSNs. The proposed method guarantees the sensing coverage of the entire area using mobile agents that autonomously perform sensing operations, transmit sensor readings, and move between sensor nodes. By gathering only sensor readings generated by sensor nodes where agents are running, our proposed method can achieve efficient gathering of sensor readings.