An energy optimized and QoS concerned data gathering protocol for wireless sensor network using variable dimensional PSO

Abstract

This paper presents a quality of service (QoS) concerned energy efficient data gathering protocol for wireless sensor network (WSN) by means of a mobile data collector (MDC). Several resource constraints of WSN nodes make the QoS preservation very challenging, particularly the energy constraint. Moreover, the energy hole problem during data communication has emerged as a major threat to QoS preservation in WSN. The state-of-the-art algorithms have employed MDC as a promising approach to effectively alleviate the energy hole problem. Efficient trajectory design can allow the MDC to sojourn at limited data collection points (CPs) while covering significantly more nodes, reducing energy consumption and latency in data collection. However, estimation of the optimal number of CPs and MDC trajectory design is an NP-hard problem in a large-scale network. To solve this problem, variable dimensional particle swarm optimization (VD-PSO) is leveraged for the optimal nomination of CPs, and ant colony optimization is applied to determine the best trajectory visiting all the nominated CPs. A multi-objective fitness function is designed to assess the quality of the nominated CPs by considering various QoS metrics. In order to accelerate the convergence of the VD-PSO algorithm, a modified particle update procedure and dimensionality pruning are also introduced. The simulation results depict the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in terms of network lifetime, total energy consumption, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, etc.