Data Spider: A Resilient Mobile Basestation Protocol for Efficient Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Traditional deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) rely on static basestations to collect data. For applications with highly spatio-temporal and dynamic data generation, such as tracking and detection applications, static basestations suffer from communication bottlenecks and long routes, which cause reliability and lifetime to plummet. To address this problem, we propose a holistic solution where the synergy of the WSN and the mobile basestation improves the reliability and lifetime of data collection. The WSN component of our solution is a lightweight dynamic routing tree maintenance protocol which tracks the location of the basestation to provide an always connected network. The mobile basestation component of our solution complements the dynamic tree reconfiguration protocol by trailing towards the data generation; and hence, reducing the number of hops the data needs to travel to the basestation. While both protocols are simple and lightweight, combined they lead to significant improvements in the reliability and lifetime of data collection. We provide an analytical discussion of our solution along with extensive simulations.