Shortest path planning of a data mule in wireless sensor networks

Data mules are extensively used for data collection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which significantly reduces energy consumption at sensor nodes but increases the data delivery latency. In this paper, we focus on minimizing the length of the traveling path to reduce the data delivery latency. We first model the shortest path planning of a data mule as an optimization problem, and propose an optimal model and corresponding solving algorithm. The optimal model solution has high time complexity, mainly due to the parallel optimization of node visit arrangements and data access point (DAP) settings during the solution process, which is to obtain the shortest path result. In order to improve the computational efficiency, we next give the approximate model and its solving algorithm, which is mainly to decompose the path planning problem into the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and nonlinear optimization problem, and optimize the two parts separately. The proposed approach is capable of expressing the influence of the communication range of each sensor node, which is suitable for more general application scenarios than the existing methods. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the solution has good performances in terms of path length and computational efforts.