TAPEMAN: Towards an Optimal Data GatheringMechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we study the lifetime optimizationproblem using a mobile sink node in a storageconstrainedwireless sensor network, and propose an optimaldata gathering mechanism named (TAPEMAN) whichruns in three steps: first a tight upper bound of the networklifetime is derived through analysis of energy consumption,then we generate a Traveling salesman problem(TSP) solution based on a 2-approximation O(n2) algorithm.A judgment will be made about whether thissolution is optimal. If the answer is yes, TAPEMAN terminates.If not, a novel data diffusion scheme is used todistribute data to neighboring nodes, in order to avoid dataleaking. We prove that under some reasonable assumptions,our algorithm can achieve this upperbound. Simulationresults demonstrate the efficiency of our proposedsolution and substantiate the importance of using sink mobilityfor energy-constrained sensor networks.