Abstract
By utilizing mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), WSNs can be deployed in more challenging environments that cannot connect with the Internet, such as those that are isolated or dangerous, and can also achieve a balanced energy consumption among sensors which leads to prolonging the network lifetime. However, an additional overhead is required to check the current location of the sink in order for a node to transmit data to the mobile sink, and the size of the overhead is proportional to that of the network. Meanwhile, WSNs composed of solar-powered nodes have recently been actively studied for the perpetual operation of a network. This study addresses both of these research topics simultaneously, and proposes a method to support an efficient location service for a mobile sink utilizing the surplus energy of a solar-powered WSN. In this scheme, nodes that have a sufficient energy budget can constitute rings, and the nodes belonging to these rings (which are called ring nodes) maintain up-to-date location information on the mobile sink node and serve this information to the other sensor nodes. Because each ring node only uses surplus energy to serve location information, this does not affect the performance of a node’s general operations (e.g., sensing, processing, and data delivery). Moreover, because multiple rings can exist simultaneously in the proposed scheme, the overhead for acquiring the position information of the sink can be significantly reduced, and also hardly increases even if the network size becomes larger.
Highlights
We propose a more efficient and scalable mobile sink location management scheme for solar-powered wireless sensor networks (WSNs)
We propose a multiple-ring routing (MRR) scheme, which represents an efficient mobile sink location management system for solar-powered WSNs, tailored from the existing ring routing scheme
The proposed MRR scheme employs the energy model of a solar-powered node to utilize part of the harvested energy to construct a ring. Because this method only consumes surplus energy except for that required for typical operations of a sensor node, it does not degrade the performance of each node while maintaining multiple rings concurrently
Summary
A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network composed of ultra-small, low-cost, and low-power sensor elements, and its wide-ranging fields of application include military surveillance, environmental monitoring, health care, home automation, and traffic control [1,2]. In order to fundamentally solve the limited energy problem, research has actively been conducted in recent years on an energy-harvesting sensor node that collects and utilizes surrounding energy, such as environmental energy [3]. Energy-harvesting sensor nodes collect energy through the sun, pressure, wind, and temperature differences Among these sources, solar energy is considered to be the optimal energy source for WSNs, owing to its energy density and periodicity. Area-based schemes are popular because they enjoy advantages in that they are easier and more efficient to construct than other schemes They suffer from the critical disadvantage of low scalability, which means that the efficiency can be affected by the size of the network (the number of nodes). We propose a more efficient and scalable mobile sink location management scheme for solar-powered WSNs
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