Employing Sink Mobility to Extend the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) often employs miniaturized battery-operated nodes. Since in most setups it is infeasible or impractical to replace the onboard energy supply, the design and operation of WSNs are subject to a great deal of optimization. Among the most popular strategies is the pursuance of multi-hop routes for forwarding collected sensor data to a gateway. In that case, the gateway becomes a sink for all traffic and the closeby nodes relay lots of packets and deplete their battery rather quickly. In this paper, the mobility of the gateway is exploited to balance the load on the sensors and avoid the overload on the nodes in the proximity of the gateway. A novel approach for defining a travel path for the sink is presented. The proposed approach is validated in a simulated environment and is shown to significantly boost the network lifetime.