Optimized Path for Traversal of Mobile Sink in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Employing mobile sink(s) provide considerable benefits to the deployed Wireless Sensor Network(s) (WSNs) in terms of increased network lifetime, decreased energy consumption, decreased data latency and evenly distributed load on the sensors in the network. A mobile sink is typically a mobile robot or a small vehicle, consisting of a powerful transceiver, high powered battery and a large memory. Typically the sensor nodes are deployed randomly resulting in multiple WSN partitions. Clusters are formed based on these partitions and relay nodes (RNs) are deployed as cluster heads (CHs) using meta heuristic algorithms. The deployed RNs perform the role of single hop data acquisition from the sensor nodes and relaying it to the sink thereby maintaining the data delivery latency. In this paper, three mobile sink traversal techniques are simulated for data collection purpose. The results obtained through extensive simulations demonstrate the superiority of Bat algorithm for relay node placement.