Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks using Multiple Mobile Data Collection Agents

Abstract

Mobile agent based data gathering in Distributed Sensor Networks (DSN) has been a topic of significant research in recent years. In this work, we consider a network architecture for DSN that makes use of hybrid nodes with Radio Frequency (RF) and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) communication. It uses a hierarchical network based approach with reduced connectivity constraint between cluster heads. Each cluster of lite sensor nodes and the corresponding cluster head, also termed as Sophisticated Node (SN) work as an independent unit. Mobile Data Collection Agents (MDCA) such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or mobile robots are used to gather the data from the sophisticated node. Intra-cluster data gathering is done using traditional RF communication. SNs are also equipped with UWB transmitters to transfer data with high rate to MDCAs. Further, we also developed a multiple mobile agent based data gathering algorithm (MMDG) that takes into account the priority of data and life time of the SNs. It provides intelligence to a MDCA on tour to effectively use waiting time in case of a priority request from the node. Simulation based analysis is used to show the effectiveness of algorithm in terms of time of tour, network coverage, life-time of the SNs and data collected in the tour. Simulation results show that priority based data collection is very effective and that dynamic tour of MDCA can effectively use the waiting time in the schedule to gather about 20 percent of additional data from higher priority SNs.