An analytical model for deploying mobile sinks in industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Nowadays, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has the potential to be implemented in factories and supply chains to improve manufacturing efficiency. It is becoming more common to use mobile robots in such factories for further improvements. Adding data collection capability to the mobile robots would realize the mobile sink deployment in future factories. As it is important to reduce the deployment cost, we are aiming at a network with minimum number of mobile sinks while ensuring network reliability and timeliness. In this paper, we analytically model a given trajectory for the motion of mobile sinks and the routing of mobile sinks along the trajectory in an IIoT system. We introduce an optimization problem in the form of Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to specify the minimum number of required mobile sinks to reduce deployment cost of an IIoT system, and also to identify the routing of multiple mobile sinks along a given trajectory. The proposed ILP model can be solved by several existing off-the-shelf ILP-solvers.