A trade-off between energy consumption reduction and responsiveness in information delivery for delay-tolerant sensor networks with mobile sink

In a delay-tolerant sensor network where the sink is mobile, a node can conveniently hold an information packet until the sink comes closer. This allows to both decrease the number of wireless hops required to deliver the information to the sink and reduce energy consumption. Thus, mobility of nodes can be exploited to increase energy efficiency in sensor networks. However, a major drawback of the above policy is that it causes delay which may be not acceptable for the application. In this paper a trade-off between energy efficiency and delay is investigated. More specifically, an analytical framework which allows to evaluate the expected delivery cost with respect to the maximum delay acceptable for the application is derived and assessed by comparison with simulation results. Numerical results show that the analytical framework is very accurate and, as expected, accuracy increases as the density of nodes in the network increases.

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