Efficient Flooding Strategy in Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Robots

Flooding is an important operation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), but the energy of sensor nodes is usually limited and the communication links are unreliable in WSNs. An efficient flooding strategy is designed for low-duty-cycle WSNs where mobile robots act as data sinks with considering both delay performance and energy efficiency. The smallest enclosing circle algorithm is used to search the optimal flooding position. And then, a delay-constrained energy-efficient broadcasting algorithm (DCEBT) is presented. DCEBT adopts a novel metric for energy optimization, and restricts the delay of nodes based on their locations. The results show that exploiting the mobility of robots to optimize the flooding position could improve the flooding performance. And compared with common flooding schemes, DCEBT increases the energy efficiency greatly while achieving comparable delay performance.