Mobility to improve the lifetime of wireless sensor networks : a theoretical framework

Abstract

Although commonly considered as a harm in wireless networks, mobility

can potentially be beneficial to wireless sensor networks that usually

consist of static nodes. A recent boom of applying mobile devices to

improve the lifetime of wireless sensor networks has lead to a great deal

of meaningful contributions, both in theory and practice. In this paper,

we survey the efforts relevant to this topic. In addition, we also identify

the lack of theoretical understanding of one of the approaches, namely

mobile sink. We hence briefly describe a theoretical framework that we

have obtained recently; it aims at bringing deeper insight on the optimal

way of using mobile sinks for lifetime improvement.