Ferry-based data gathering in wireless sensor networks with path selection

Depending on the application, mobile ferries can be used for collecting data in a WSN especially those at a large-scale with delay tolerant applications. Unlike data collection via multi-hop forwarding among the sensing nodes, ferries travel across the sensing field to collect data. A ferry based approach eliminates or minimizes the need for multi-hop forwarding of data, and as a result energy consumption at the nodes will be significantly reduced especially nodes that are near the base station as they are used by other nodes to forward data to the base station. However, this increases data delivery latency and as such might not be suitable for all applications. In this paper an efficient data collection scheme using a ferry node is proposed with emphasis of the effect of ferry's path. In this scheme the decision of selecting cluster heads is based on their residual energy and their distance from the ferry path. We simulated the proposed scheme in MATLAB using different scenarios to show their performance in terms of the network lifetime and total energy consumption in the network. We found that the centered and the diagonal fitted paths performed better than the diagonal path in terms of the network lifetime and energy consumed. We also found that increasing the check points increases the lifetime of the network.