Energy-efficient Routing Scheme Using Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy awareness is an essential design issue in wireless sensor network. Therefore, attention must be given to the routing protocols since they might differ depending on the application and network architecture. It is desired to design the energy efficient routing protocols to conserve the poser supply of sensor node and prolongs its lifetime. Recently sink mobility has been exploited in numerous schemes to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), but sink mobility bring a new challenges in wireless sensor network; such as sink location maintenance, continuous data delivery, avoiding/reducing detour problem etc. In this paper, in order to reduce energy consumption and minimize the overhead of rerouting frequency, we propose an Energy-Efficient Routing Scheme using Mobile Sinks (EERS-MS) in Wireless Sensor Networks. This scheme uses the grid that is constructed by the sink appearing first in the sensor field or when no valid grid exists. In this scheme source(s) utilizes the sink location information to communicate with sink(s). Data is disseminated to the sink through grid nodes (GN) using greedy geographical forwarding techniques. Analytical and simulation study reveals significant improvement in term of both energy efficiency and routing performance in comparison to existing schemes. Keywords— Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Sink Mobility, Data Dissemination, Energy Efficient.