Single Mobile Sink Based Energy Efficiency and Fast Data Gathering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, the exponential rise in communication system demands has motivated global academia-industry to develop efficient communication technologies to fulfill energy efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) demands. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) being one of the most efficient technologies possesses immense potential to serve major communication purposes including civil, defense and industrial purposes etc. The inclusion of sensor-mobility with WSN has broadened application horizon. The effectiveness of WSNs can be characterized by its ability to perform efficient data gathering and transmission to the base station for decision process. Clustering based routing scheme has been one of the dominating techniques for WSN systems; however key issues like, cluster formation, selection of the number of clusters and cluster heads, and data transmission decision from sensors to the mobile sink have always been an open research area. In this paper, a robust and energy efficient single mobile sink based WSN data gathering protocol is proposed. Unlike existing approaches, an enhanced centralized clustering model is developed on the basis of expectation-maximization (EEM) concept. Further, it is strengthened by using an optimal cluster count estimation technique that ensures that the number of clusters in the network region doesn’t introduce unwanted energy exhaustion. Meanwhile, the relative distance between sensor node and cluster head as well as mobile sink is used to make transmission (path) decision. Results exhibit that the proposed EEM based clustering with optimal cluster selection and optimal dynamic transmission decision enables higher throughput, fast data gathering, minima delay and energy consumption, and higher efficiency.