A Distributed Multilevel Data Collection Mechanism Using Bus in WSNs

Data collection using mobile sink has received much attention in the past years. In the literature, most studies assumed that the mobile sink was controllable and the proposed algorithm made decisions to control the path, speed, and stop locations. However, there still exists some challenges in using the controllable mobile sink, including limited energy and the adaptive capability for overcoming the obstacles. This article considers the bus as the uncontrollable mobile sink to collect data from a given set of deployed static sensors. A distributed data collection mechanism, called energy balanced multihop data collection (EBMDC), is proposed that aims at maximizing the transmitted data volume from sensors to the bus while prolonging the network lifetime of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). To prolong the network lifetime, each sensor node distributes its data to its multiple parents in trees according to their remaining energies. Then, each anchor node locally schedules its transmission slots based on its and its neighbor's data volumes and remaining energies such that all data can be forwarded to the bus without collision and the lifetime of each anchor can be balanced. Experimental studies reveal that the proposed EBMDC algorithm outperforms related studies in terms of throughput, network lifetime, slot utilization, data loss ratio, and fairness.