Hybrid mobile access coordinated wireless sensor networks — Design and analysis

Abstract

This paper introduces and analyzes a novel mobile access coordinated wireless sensor network (MC-WSN) architecture. In conventional sensor networks with mobile access points (SENMA), the mobile access (MA) points traverse the network to collect information directly from individual sensors. While simplifying the routing process, a major limitation with SENMA is that data transmission is limited by the physical speed of the MAs and their trajectory length, resulting in low throughput and large delay. In an effort to resolve this problem, we introduce the MC-WSN architecture, for which a major feature is that: through active network deployment and topology design, the number of hops from any sensor to the MA can be limited to a pre-specified number. In this paper, we first present the MC-WSN architecture development and topology design, then provide the throughput analysis. Our analysis is demonstrated through numerical results. It is shown that MC-WSN achieves much higher throughput over SENMA.