Description

We address how to design a distributed movement strategy for mobile collectors, which can be either physical mobile agents or query/collector packets periodically launched by the sink, to achieve successful data gathering in wireless sensor networks. Formulating the problem as general random walks on a graph composed of sensor nodes, we analyze how much data can be successfully gathered in time under any Markovian random-walk movement strategies for mobile collectors moving over a graph (or network), while each sensor node is equipped with limited buffer space and data arrival rates are heterogeneous over different sensor nodes.