mWSN for Large Scale Mobile Sensing

• Published in: Journal of signal processing systems Vol. 51; no. 2; pp. 195 - 206
• Main Authors: Ma, Jian, Chen, Canfeng, Salomaa, Jyri P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01-05-2008
• Subjects: Circuits and Systems; Computer Imaging; Electrical Engineering; Engineering; Image Processing and Computer Vision; Pattern Recognition; Pattern Recognition and Graphics; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Vision; mobile sink; mobility; wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1939-8018; 1939-8115
• DOI: 10.1007/s11265-007-0118-x

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art features introduced by sink mobility into wireless sensor networks (WSN), and introduces the architecture of mobile enabled Wireless Sensor Network (mWSN) to realize large-scale information gathering via networked wireless sensors and mobile sinks. After introducing the mobile sensing scenarios, some fundamental design parameters in mWSN have been investigated, such as cluster size, sink velocity, transmission range, and packet length. Our contributions include: (1) A cluster formation method has been proposed via multihop forwarding to form a cluster around the expected position of a mobile sink, in order to guarantee packet delay and minimize energy consumption. (2) Analysis of the performance influence by sink mobility leads to the conclusion that the optimal sink velocity must make a compromise between sink-sensor meeting delay and message delivery delay. (3) Finding that large transmission range and short packet length are both of benefit to lower the outage probability of packet transmission. Extensive simulations have been designed to evaluate the performance of mWSN in terms of packet delay, energy consumption and outage probability of packet transmission.