Scheduling under Location and Time Constraints for Data Collection in Sensor Networks ( Work in Progress paper )

Unlike the traditional multihop forwarding approach, an alternative approach for data collection in sensor networks is to exploit the mobility: a mobile node travels through the sensor field and collects data from each sensor when it is at the proximity. In this paper, we define data mule scheduling problem and formulate it as a scheduling problem that has both location constraints and time constraints. We present some initial results on simple cases of data mule scheduling problem and suggest similarities with speed scaling problems such as DVS (Dynamic Voltage Scaling).