An extended ACO-based mobile sink path determination in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a mobile sink accumulate the data instead of routing directly to the sink to avoid the hotspot problem. In this process, it traverses a predetermined path by visiting a set of nodes called the rendezvous point (RP), and all the non-rendezvous points can transmit their data to the closest RP. Identifying the best collection of RPs and determining the mobile sink traveling path will decrease data loss and improve network performance. However, choosing a set of RPs and the route between them is a challenging task. It is more complicated in the event-driven applications due to the uneven data rate of SNs. In this context, we propose an extended ant colony optimization (ACO)-based mobile sink path construction for event-driven WSNs. In this, the best set of the RPs and the efficient mobile sink traveling path between them is determined. In addition to this, the RPs re-selection mechanism also adopted for balancing the energy between the nodes. After that, the virtual RPs are introduced to minimize the data transmissions between the sensor nodes and RPs. This process will improve WSNs’ performance in terms of reducing data losses while increasing network lifetime. The improved performance of the extended ACO-MSPD over existing is confirmed through simulation tests.