Autonomous path based data acquisition in sensor networks

Abstract

Data acquisition in a wireless sensor network typically involves routing data from numerous sensors toward a static sink or a base station. To achieve this efficiently, mobile sink strategies have been investigated by numerous researchers. However, a thorough qualitative study of the mobile sink path has mostly been disregarded in the literature. As such no strong common qualitative measurement can be asserted regarding a particular technique against the others. This paper proposes a new technique based on the space filling curve which produces a mobile sink path for an arbitrarily network shape. Furthermore, we refine this technique such that a path can cover the network of different granularity. Finally we also propose a common path quality measurement which can be used to compare path qualities between various techniques.