Improving reporting delay and lifetime of a WSN using controlled mobile sinks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are characterized by many to one traffic pattern, where a large number of nodes communicate their sensed data to the sink node. Due to heavy data traffic near the sink node, the nodes closer to sink node tends to exhaust their energy faster compared to those nodes which are situated away from the sink. This may lead to the fragment of a network due to the early demise of sensor nodes situated closer to the sink. To pacify this problem, mobile sinks are proposed for WSNs. Mobile sinks are capable to provide uniform energy consumption, load distribution, low reporting delay and quick data delivery paths. However, the position of the mobile sink needs to be updated regularly as such position update messages may reduce the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel Location Aware Routing for Controlled Mobile Sinks (LARCMS), which will help in minimizing reporting delay, enhancing network lifetime, handling sink position updates and providing uniform energy consumption. The proposed technique uses two mobile sinks in predefined trajectory for data collection and provides better results compared to existing techniques. The performance of LARCMS is evaluated by comparing with similar mobile sink routing protocols through extensive simulations in MATLAB.