Ef cient Multi-sink Relocation in Wireless Sensor Networks

— The research community in wireless systems hold a keen interest in sensor networks issues. Sensor networks are dense wireless networks where information is gathered by sensor elements spread out in an interest area. Wireless sensors applications cover a large eld such as surveillance and security, target tracking, agriculture, health and military purposes. The main de ciency of sensors is their nite source of energy. Therefore, an ef cient utilization of this energy resource conditions the network lifetime. In order to enhance the performance of these networks, some research efforts have focused on the mobility of a single or multiple sink nodes. The mobility of sinks introduces a tradeoff between the need for frequent re-routing to optimize the performance and the minimization of the overhead resulting from this topology management. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic approach to extend the lifetime of a sensor network based on both mobility and multiplicity of sinks. According to the evolution of the network, in terms of energy dissipation and distribution, this approach aims to nd the optimal position for all the sinks in order to optimize the lifetime of the network and move accordingly these sinks in an intelligent manner. Simulation results show the ef ciency of our approach in terms of energy gain.