Improved wireless sensor networks durability through efficient sink motion strategy

Abstract

Over more than one decade, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) continue to draw more and more researchers attention because of the enormous benefit potential they may provide for industrial and socio-economical domains. Increasingly, lots of WSN applications are developed for many strategic, vital and comfort purpose areas. However, the prediction of WSNs widespread development has not yet reached the expected satisfactory level because of many obstacles slowing down their maturity. So, the limited energy budget the nodes have to use is the most decisive factor on which a WSN relies on. Knowing that the mainspring of a WSN is to provide end user with surroundings information gathered by sink from cluster heads, and the energy dissipation is proportional to distance between sender and receiver, so moving sink near clusterheads to collect sensed data is more advantageous. In this paper, we propose a new sink moving strategy and new clusters formation algorithm for which performance evaluation results obtained through NS2 simulator in terms of energy saving and WSN life time improvement are very convincing.