A piecewise geometry method for optimizing the motion planning of data mule in tele-health wireless sensor networks

Abstract In tele-health wireless sensor networks (WSNs), data mules (DMs) can be despatched to collect and deliver distributed healthcare data via wireless communication. However, to improve the delivery efficiency, it is very important to reduce the data latency. In this paper, we aim at minimizing the data latency through DM motion planning, which includes path selection and speed control. We first model and formulate the problem as a geometric optimization problem and then propose a convex hull based two-phase method. In the first phase of the method, the convex hull structure is utilized to depict a path skeleton, and in the second phase, speed control is considered to regulate the path skeleton. Simulation experiments show that the proposed method exhibits an average of 10–20 % decrease in the latency of data collection. The results suggest that the data collection efficiency can be improved by the proposed method, and the DM approach is feasible and effective for healthcare data delivery in WSN-based tele-health applications.

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