Fault-resilient sensing in wireless sensor networks

Research on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has received tremendous attention in the past few years due to their potential applications and advances in the VLSI design. In WSNs with tiny sensors, mobility of a sink may provide an energy efficient way for data dissemination. Having a mobile sink in WSN, however, creates new challenges to routing and sensor distribution modeling in the network. In this paper, based on clustering and routing optimization algorithms, we propose a new scheme called K-means and TSP-based mobility (KAT mobility). After clustering the sensor nodes, the proposed method navigates the mobile sink to traverse through the cluster centers according to the trajectory of an optimized route. The mobile sink then collects the data from sensors at the visited clusters. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme can provide not only better energy efficiency as compared to those obtained by conventional methods which assume random waypoint for the mobile sink, but also fault-resilience in case of malfunctions of some sensors due to attacks. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.