Virtual Force Based Sink Relocation Strategy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sink relocation has been proven as an effective solution to relieve the network hot point problem, and to balance nodes’ energy consumption and thus prolong the network lifetime for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a Virtual Force based Sink Relocation strategy, called VFSR, which utilizes the resultant force derived from two kinds of virtual force, gravitational one and border repulsive one, to impel the sink node to relocate to the desired position. In VFSR, the gravitational force exists between each sensor and the sink, and is proportional to the node’s residual energy and inversely proportional to the distance from the node to the sink. The border repulsive force is adapted to avoid the sink node wandering nearby the network border. Under the action of the gravitational and the border repulsive force, the sink node approaches the nodes with high residual energy and makes them relay data from other nodes, which reduces data transmission overload of the nodes with low energy. Through simulation, we validate the effectiveness of VFSR.