An energy efficient approach for data collection in wireless sensor networks using public transportation vehicles

Applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) involve a large number of energy constrained nodes to monitor the areas of interest, where the energy efficiency is an important concern of network design. Compared to the conventional approach using multihop communication, mobile sinks (MSs) attached to public transportation vehicles, such as buses, are the ideal infrastructure for collecting sensory data. This paper studies the problem of using such MSs to collect data from sensor nodes that are nonuniformly deployed. The proposed protocol aims at balancing the energy consumption, including energy expenditure to transmit data packet and network overhead across the network, to make the network operate as long as possible with all nodes alive. We design an energy-aware unequal clustering algorithm and an energy-aware routing algorithm. Theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach against the alternative methods.