EBDC An Energy-Balanced Data Collection Mechanism Using a Mobile Data Collector in WSNs.docVIP

Sensors 2012, 12, 5850-5871; doi:10.3390/s120505850 OPEN ACCESS sensors ISSN 1424-8220 /journal/sensors Article EBDC: An Energy-Balanced Data Collection Mechanism Using a Mobile Data Collector in WSNs Chih-Yung Chang *, Chih-Yu Lin and Chin-Hwa Kuo Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, No. 151, Yingzhuan Road, Tamsui District, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan; E-Mails: cylin@.tw (C.-Y.L.); chkuo@.tw (C.-H.K.) * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: cychang@.tw; Tel.: +886-2-2621-5656 (ext. 2749); Fax: +886-2-2620-9749. Received: 13 March 2012; in revised form: 20 April 2012 / Accepted: 2 May 2012 / Published: 7 May 2012 Abstract: The data collection problem is one of the most important issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Constructing a tree from all sensor nodes to the sink node is the simplest way, but this raises the problem of energy unbalance since the sensors closer to the sink node would have much higher workloads from relaying data. To cope with the energy unbalance problem, a number of mobile-sink mechanisms have been proposed in recent years. This paper proposes an Energy-Balanced Data Collection mechanism, called EBDC, which determines the trajectory of a mobile data collector (or mobile sink) such that the data-relaying workloads of all sensors can be totally balanced. Theoretical analysis and performance evaluation reveal that the proposed EBDC mechanism outperforms the existing approaches in terms of network lifetime and the degree of energy balancing. Keywords: wireless sensor networks; data collection; mobile sink; energy balancing 1. Introduction Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have many potential applications, which include environmental monitoring, tracking, healthcare, surveillance, smart homes and so forth [1–4]. Since sensors are battery powered, prolonging the network lifetime of WSNs is crucial for the usage o