Designing Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

Mobile enable Wireless Sensor Network (mWSN) has been proposed to realize large-scale information gathering via networking wireless sensors and mobile sinks. Some fundamental design parameters in mWSN have been investigated in this article, such as cluster size, sink velocity, transmission range, and packet length. Our contributions include: 1) We propose to use multihop forwarding to form a cluster around the expected position of a mobile sink, in order to guarantee packet delay and minimize energy consumption. 2) Sink velocity should be carefully chosen, in order to make a compromise between sink-sensor meeting delay and message delivery delay. 3) Large transmission range and short packet length are both of benefit to lower the outage probability of packet transmission. Extensive simulations have been designed to evaluate the performance of mWSN in terms of packet delay, energy consumption and outage probability.