A mobile data collection method for balancing energy consumption and delay in strip-shaped wireless sensor networks with branches

Strip-shaped Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with branches are commonly used in various long and narrow applications, such as mines, factories, subways, and pipelines, and they face serious energy hole problems caused by multi-hop communication. The Mobile Data Collector (MDC) can alleviate the energy hole problem. Current solutions have two limitations: one is the balance between energy consumption and delay, and the other is the overly ideal network model, e.g., the square region or circular area. This paper focuses on strip-shaped networks and proposes a novel mobile data collection method to find a trade-off between energy preservation and data delivery delay. Firstly, the MDC path is planned by solving the diameter of the tree in the network, resulting in reduced delay. Secondly, the network energy consumption is further reduced by clustering and optimal transmission distance adjustment. Then, a network lifetime balancing mechanism is designed to balance network energy between backbone and branches. Finally, the performance of the algorithm proposed in this paper has been studied in four types of strip-shaped WSNs and compared with four existing MDC methods with evaluation metrics of maximum node energy consumption, network delay and weighted sum of both. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is applicable to different types of strip-shaped WSNs with branches and achieves excellent network performance, which can effectively balance network energy consumption and data collection delay.