Exploiting mobility for quality-maximized data collection in energy harvesting sensor networks

With the advance of energy harvesting technology, more and more sensors now are powered by ambient energy. Energy harvesting sensor networks are a key step in paving the way for truly green systems that can operate 'perpetually' and do not adversely impact on the environment. In this paper we consider quality data collection in an energy harvesting sensor network by exploring sink mobility. That is, we consider a mobile sink traveling along a to-be-found trajectory for data collection, subject to a specified tolerant delay constraint. We first formulate this optimization problem as a data quality maximization problem. Since the problem is NP-hard, we then devise a scalable heuristic solution. Also, a distributed implementation of the proposed algorithm is developed too. We finally conduct extensive experiments by simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising and very efficient.