Use of Mobile Relay in Data-Intensive Wireless Sensor Networks

WSN are increasingly used in different types of data-intensive applications scenarios such as micro-climate monitoring, precision agriculture, and audio/video surveillance. The sensor nodes are tiny and limited in power. Sensor types vary according to the application of WSN. Whatever be the application the key challenge is to transmit all the data generated within an application’s lifetime to the base station despite the fact that sensor nodes have limited power supplies. The concept of mobile relay is that the mobile nodes change their locations so as to minimize the total energy consumed by both wireless transmission and locomotion. The conventional methods, however, do not take into account the energy level, and as a result they do not always prolong the network lifetime.