On-Demand Mobile Data Collection in Cyber-Physical Systems

The collection of sensory data is crucial for cyber-physical systems. Employing mobile agents (MAs) to collect data from sensors offers a new dimension to reduce and balance their energy consumption but leads to large data collection latency due to MAs’ limited velocity. Most existing research effort focuses on the offline mobile data collection (MDC), where the MAs collect data from sensors based on preoptimized tours. However, the efficiency of these offline MDC solutions degrades when the data generation of sensors varies. In this paper, we investigate the on-demand MDC; that is, MAs collect data based on the real-time data collection requests from sensors. Specifically, we construct queuing models to describe the First-Come-First-Serve-based MDC with a single MA and multiple MAs, respectively, laying a theoretical foundation. We also use three examples to show how such analysis guides online MDC in practice