Affiliations: Department of Multimedia Engineering, Graduate School
of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
Note: [] Corresponding author: Takahiro Hara, Department of Multimedia
Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka
University, 1-5 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan. Tel.: +81 6 6879 4513;
Fax: +81 6 6879 4514; E-mail: hara@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp
Abstract: Recently, there has been increasing interest in Mobile Wireless
Sensor Networks (MWSNs) that are constructed by mobile sensor nodes held by
ordinary people, and it has led to a new concept called urban sensing. In
such MWSNs, mobile sensor nodes densely exist, and thus, there are basically
many sensor nodes that can sense a geographical point in the entire sensing
area. To reduce the communication cost for gathering sensor data, it is
desirable to gather the sensor data from the minimum number of mobile sensor
nodes which are necessary to guarantee the sensing coverage or the quality of
services. In this paper, to achieve this, we propose a data gathering method
using mobile agents in dense MWSNs. The proposed method guarantees the sensing
coverage of the entire area using mobile agents that autonomously perform
sensing operations, transmit sensor data, and move between sensor nodes. By
gathering only sensor data generated by sensor nodes where mobile agents are
running, our proposed method can achieve efficient gathering of sensor data.
Keywords: Mobile wireless sensor networks, data gathering, mobile agent, geo-routing
