A Multi-level Method for Minimizing Data Gathering Latency in Wireless Sensor Networks using Mobile Elements

Many recent works have studied the data collection approach using mobile elements (MEs) in wireless sensor networks. In Such networks, MEs are used to visit sensors and collect data from them. The majority of existing data-gathering schemes suffer from high data-gathering latency because they use only a single ME. When the number of sensors or the network area increases, the path length of the ME increases accordingly, which results in high data gathering latency. Although some schemes use multiple MEs, they focus on maximizing network lifetime rather than minimizing packet delay or data gathering latency. In order to address the limitations of existing schemes, this paper focuses on minimizing packet delay for given number of MEs. To achieve the minimum packet delay, an optimization problem is formulated. Then, traveling distance and traveling time of MEs are estimated. The interior-point algorithm is used to obtain the optimal solution for optimization problem. Numerical results and analysis are presented to validate the proposed method.