Efficient Nearest Neighbor Heuristic TSP Algorithms for Reducing Data Acquisition Latency of UAV Relay WSN

The use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a relay in wireless sensor networks significantly reduces sensor nodes' energy consumption as the UAV replaces the multi-hop communication among nodes. As a consequence, the functional lifetime of the network is elongated in exchange for higher data delivery latency. Due to the NP-hardness of the travelling salesman problem (TSP) whose computational complexity increases exponentially as an increment of number of nodes, heuristic algorithms, such as nearest neighbor (NN) heuristic TSP algorithm, have been developed for reducing this data delivery latency in shortest possible time. In this paper, we proposed three efficient algorithms that modify the existing NN algorithm to gain a reduction in the data delivery latency with no significant change in computational time. Analytical and simulation results demonstrated that our proposed algorithms outperform the existing NN algorithm in reducing the data delivery latency, especially for nodes that are densely deployed and having relatively larger transmission ranges.