Determination of Collection Points for Disjoint Wireless Sensor Networks

When the connection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is broken, a subset of nodes which serve as the data collection points (CPs) can buffer the data from sensors and transfer these data to mobile data collectors (MDCs) to restore the connectivity of WSNs. One of the existing problems is how to decide the numbers and positions of CPs for obtaining an optimal path of MDC. In order to deal with this problem, a selection method of CPs is proposed to reduce the traveling distance of MDCs. Meanwhile, with this selection method, the changing rules and the stability of the path of MDC are theoretically proved. A 100-node WSN is implemented to test the proposed method. The evaluation results verify that the proposed method is efficient and valuable.