Obstacle Adaptive Smooth Path Planning for Mobile Data Collector in the Internet of Things

In the edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) era, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the prime source for data collection. In such WSNs, mobile edge nodes such as mobile sinks (MSs) are the superior means to collect sensed data by visiting rendezvous points (RPs). However, WSNs are often obstacle-ridden, which creates hurdles to the movement of the MSs. Most of the existing path planning works dealing with obstacles do not address optimal and smooth path construction. In other words, they have not considered a) optimizing the number of RPs and constructing a feasible path and b) smoothing the constructed path by considering sharp edges and convexity of the obstacle perimeter. In this paper, we address all such issues and develop an efficient scheme for determining an optimal number of RPs using a greedy approach to the set-cover problem and optimized path construction, both in polynomial time. Then, we apply the modified BUG2 algorithm to construct an obstacle-free path, which is then smoothed using the concept of the Bezier curve. Extensive simulations show the superiority of our proposed scheme over the existing algorithms in terms of energy consumption, latency, and so on.