Delay-tolerant data gathering in energy harvesting sensor networks with a mobile sink

In this paper we consider data collection in an energy harvesting sensor network with a mobile sink, where a mobile sink travels along a trajectory for data collection subject to a specified tolerant delay constraint T. The problem is to find an optimal close trajectory for the mobile sink that consists of sojourn locations and the sojourn time at each location such that the network throughput is maximized, assuming that the mobile sink can only collect data from one-hop sensors, for which we first show that the problem is NP-hard. We then devise novel heuristic algorithms. We finally conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. We also investigate the impact of different parameters on the performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are efficient. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first kind of work of data collection for energy harvesting sensor networks with mobile sinks.