An energy efficient and load balanced sink mobility for wireless sensor networks

The uniform energy dissipation of sensor nodes is a key objective to optimise network lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In recent studies, a mobile sink implementation has been used instead of static sink and it offers better energy balanced network. This approach used four design constraints of sink mobility in WSN to achieve uniform energy dissipation of nodes in the network. These design constraints are: sink mobility pattern, node deployment technique, scheduling of node activities, and routing of data to the sink. In the literature, the existing approaches have utilised only subset of these design constraints. In our proposed approach all four design constraints have been used in an integrated manner and have been implemented in a three steps solution to achieve the energy load balanced sink mobility in the WSNs. The results have been compared using performance metrics such as coverage density, network lifetime, and energy balancing condition. These metrics are derived and further implemented through simulation. The simulation results confirm that the proposed solution outperforms the existing sink mobility patterns. © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.