Geometric Algorithm for Finding Time-Sensitive Data Gathering Path in Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks

To perform large-scale monitoring of sensitive events, energy harvesting wireless sensor network is considered where a mobile data sink
$MS$
collects data while travelling on a fixed path
$P_{ms}$
. The sensor nodes sense environmental data continuously at a pre-specified rate. The sensors close to
$P_{ms}$
are referred as gateways. Sensors forward their data to the
$MS$
through the gateways. In practice, the usage of
$MS$
is not suitable for time-sensitive applications due to its long data gathering delay. Time-bound data gathering for path constrained environment is not accounted in literature. We aim at finding energy-efficient maximum data gathering sub-path for the MS for a given data gathering period
$T$
. To deal with the problem a novel optimal deterministic data collection sub-path finding algorithm is proposed which is based on the geometric properties of the sensors’ communication disks and the data gathering path. It maximizes the data collection and reduces the energy consumption by jointly optimizing the data gathering sub-path selection and the data forwarding path optimization. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with an existing baseline algorithm DDGA and a heuristic algorithm H-DGSPF. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms DDGA and H-DGSPF in terms of data collection, data delivery success ratio, and energy consumption