An Improved Data Collection Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

This article studies the minimum latency collection scheduling (MLCS) problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The MLCS problem targets to compute a schedule with minimum number of timeslots that guarantees to collect data from all nodes to a sink node without any collision. Several scheduling algorithms have been proposed for the NP-hard problem, and they assign timeslots based on hop distances among nodes. The proposed algorithm not only uses hop distances, but also partitions a network into square cells and assign timeslots based on cell distances among nodes. The latency performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with an existing algorithm whose approximation ratio is currently the best, and the simulations show that the proposed algorithm performs better.