Enhancement of Data Collection Performance in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Path-Constrained Mobile Sink

Abstract

Due to the energy limitation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), most researches related to data collection in WSNs focus on how to collect the maximum amount of data from the network with minimizing the energy consumption as much as possible. Many types of research that are related to data collection are proposed to overcome this issue by using mobility with path constrained as Maximum Amount Shortest Path routing Protocol (MASP) and zone-based algorithms. Recently, Zone-based Energy-Aware Data Collection Protocol (ZEAL) and Enhanced ZEAL have been presented to reduce energy consumption and provide an acceptable data delivery rate. However, the time spent on data collection operations should be taken into account, especially concerning real-time systems, as time is the most critical factor for these systems' performance. In this paper, a routing protocol is proposed to improve the time needed for the data collection process considering less energy consumption. The presented protocol uses a novel path with a communication time-slot assignment algorithm to reduce the count of cycles that are needed for the data collection process with reduction of 50% of the number of cycles needed for other protocols. Therefore, the time and energy needed for data collection are reduced by approximately 25%and 6% respectively, which prolongs the network lifetime. The proposed protocol is called Energy-Time Aware Data Collection Protocol (ETCL).