Optimized Mobile Sink Trajectory for Efficient Energy Consumption in WSNs

Abstract

Wireless Sensor network is emerging very rapidly due to its vast number of applications in every field of human life. The network is usually composed of energy constrained sensor nodes and resource unlimited sink node. The sensor nodes collect data from the environment and send data to sink via multi-hopping. Thus, the nodes around the vicinity of sink feels great burden of relaying all the sensor nodes’ data, as well as sending their own data. This creates hotspot problem causing some sensor nodes to deplete their energies earlier, network lifetime is reduced and network becomes disconnected. To eliminate this problem, sink is made to move. A number of mobilesink strategies have already been proposed, but the need of good optimum strategy is still needed. In this paper, we propose an optimized Mobile Sink Trajectory in order to collect the data from sensors in an energy efficient manner. We propose the spiralmovement of the mobile sink and argue that it provides proficient results in balancing load consumption fairly. We compare our spiral movement strategy with two other strategies; (1) when mobile sink moves along the periphery of the network, and (2) when the sink is statically placed at the centre of the network. Simulation results confirm that our proposed approach outperforms the others.