Data collection in nonuniformly deployed wireless sensor networks by public transportation vehicles

This paper studies the problem of using path constrained mobile sinks (MSs) to collect data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Accounting the feature of nonuniform node distribution, the proposed protocol aims at balancing the energy consumption, including energy expenditure to transmit data packet and network overhead, to make the network operate as long as possible with all nodes alive. We propose an energy-aware unequal clustering algorithm and an energy-aware routing algorithm. Through simulations, we confirm that the proposed approach achieves longer network lifetime against alternatives.