Copyright © 2007 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We propose to develop Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks (MSSN), under high sensor node density, where multiple sensor nodes need to share one single communication channel in the node-to-sink transmission. By exploiting the tradeoff between the successful information retrieval probability and the nodes energy consumption, a number of multiple nodes transmission scheduling algorithms are proposed. Both optimal and suboptimal algorithms, which exhibit exponential and linear complexity respectively, are discussed under the desired application. Computer simulations show that suboptimal algorithms perform nearly as good as the optimal one. The study leads to the cross-layer Wireless Link layer design for MSSN.