Path Planning in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) is a kind of wireless sensor network (WSN) with mobile sink, which is deployed in harsh environment to perform long-term tasks such as data collection and monitoring. Path planning is a fundamental problem in MWSN, which means movement of the mobile nodes in the sensing area should be designed effectively to complete the targets of data collection. However, path planning is a challenging multi-objective optimization issue. Existing schemes of path planning are classified, and their advantages and disadvantages would be compared in this paper. Finally, potential directions of future research are proposed in order to overcome shortcomings of the existing works.