Efficient rendezvous algorithms for mobility-enabled wireless sensor networks

Recent research shows that significant energy saving can be achieved in mobility-enabled wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that visit sensor nodes and collect data from them via short-range communications. However, a major performance bottleneck of such WSNs is the significantly increased latency in data collection due to the low movement speed of mobile base stations. To address this issue, we propose a rendezvous-based data collection approach in which a subset of nodes serve as rendezvous points that buffer and aggregate data originated from sources and transfer to the base station when it arrives. This approach combines the advantages of controlled mobility and in-network data caching and can achieve a desirable balance between network energy saving and data collection delay. We propose efficient rendezvous design algorithms with provable performance bounds for mobile base stations with variable and fixed tracks, respectively. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. © 2006 IEEE.