Sink Node Placement Strategies for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), all the data collected by the sensor nodes are forwarded to a sink node. Therefore, the placement of the sink node has a great impact on the energy consumption and lifetime of WSNs. This paper investigates the energy-oriented and lifetime-oriented sink node placement strategies in the single-hop and multiple-hop WSNs, respectively. The energy-oriented strategy considers only the minimizing of the total energy consumption in the networks, while the lifetime-oriented strategy focuses much more on the lifetime of the nodes which consume energy fastest. Using a routing-cost based ant routing algorithm, we evaluate the performances of different placement strategies in the networks. Simulation results show that the networks with lifetime-oriented strategy achieve a significant improvement on network lifetime.