Energy efficient multiple sink placement in wireless sensor networks

Minimizing energy consumption and maximizing network lifetime are two important challenges in battery operated Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sensor nodes sense the environment periodically and forward the collected data to a sink. In a single sink WSNs, nodes closer to the sink become overburdened for relaying excessive data. This may incur faster energy consumption by nodes and lead an energy hole around the sink. As a result, the network lifetime is shortened. Multiple sinks mitigate this problem, reduce energy consumption at nodes and prolong the network lifetime by distributing the traffic over multiple sinks. This paper focuses on multiple sink placement problem and proposes two local search technique based energy aware multiple sink placement strategies for WSNs. The lifetime oriented approach based sink placement takes into account the lifetime of nodes and places the sinks at suitable locations such that the average network lifetime is increased. While the energy oriented approach focuses on minimizing the average energy consumption of the network. We evaluate the performance of both the strategies via simulations and compare them with random sink placement strategy. Simulation results highlight that the lifetime oriented approach improves the lifetime significantly.