Cluster-Based Mobile Sink Location Management Scheme for Solar-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a sink-location management and data-routing scheme to effectively support the mobile sink in solar-powered WSN. Battery-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have a limited lifetime due to their limited energy, but solar energy-based WSNs can be supplied with energy periodically and can operate forever. On the other hand, introduction of mobile sink in WSNs can solve some energy unbalance problem between sink-neighboring nodes and outer nodes which is one of the major challenges in WSNs. However, there is a problem that additional energy should be consumed to notify each sensor node of the location of the randomly moving mobile sink. In the proposed scheme, one of the nodes that harvests enough energy in each cluster are selected as the cluster head, and the location information of the mobile sink is shared only among the cluster heads, thereby reducing the location management overhead. In addition, the overhead for setting the routing path can be removed by transferring data in the opposite direction to the path where the sink-position information is transferred among the heads. Lastly, the access node is introduced to transmit data to the sink more reliably when the sink moves frequently.