Optimal Travel Route Designing in Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

In this paper, we propose a shortest travel route planning scheme that takes into account the spatial characteristics of wireless transmissions for mobile data gathering in wireless sensor networks. We formulate the shortest travel route problem (STRP) as a covering salesman problem (CSP), which is regarded as a mixed integer nonlinear programming and also as a non- convex programming problem. To solve the STRP problem, we propose a heuristic algorithm named decomposition algorithm (DA), which decomposes the STRP problem into two subprob­lems: access sequence problem and position determining problem. We conduct extensive simulation to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show that the DA algorithm can plan the shortest travel route in large scale WSNs other than small scale WSNs by the classical traveling salesman problem (TSP) algorithms.