Periodic data collection from mobile sensors with unpredictable motion along road networks

Tracking mobile objects in road networks is one of the important applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It includes road safety, smart transportation, vehicle safety, vehicle tracking, traffic monitoring, etc. In this work, we assume that the sensors are installed on vehicles which are moving on the road. These mobile sensors need to be tracked/visited periodically within a pre-defined time interval. In our scenario, the mobility or trajectory of the mobile sensors are unpredictable. In many applications nowadays, the mobile sensors have unpredictable mobility. In this paper, our aim is to collect data by visiting the mobile sensors periodically using fewer number of mobile sinks. The mobile sinks subsequently deliver the collected data to a stationary base station. Time-bound periodic data collection from the mobile sensors along with their unpredictable motion is even more challenging than the data collection from static sensors. Here, we propose a deterministic data gathering algorithm using the solution of Chinese Postman Problem. We measure the performance of the proposed solution. Due to non-availability of any existing solution, we have compared our algorithm with a heuristic algorithm and a variation of an existing solution. The experiment results show that our proposed data gathering algorithm performs well.