EGRPM: Energy efficient geographic routing protocol based on mobile sink in wireless sensor networks

Abstract A wireless sensor network consists of a large number of nodes, sending sensed data to the base station or sink, either directly or through intermediate nodes. Multi-hop communication results in increased volume of traffic and depleting the energy of nodes adjacent to static sinks. A method of dealing with this challenge is using mobile sinks. Mobile sinks balance the load and distribute energy consumption throughout the network. This paper suggests a method to divide the network into some cells in a geographic way and applies two mobile sinks to gather the data sensed by these cell nodes. Based on the communication between cells and mobile sinks, the cells are divided into two categories: single-hop communication cells (SCCs) and multi-hop communication cells (MCCs). Mobile sinks move over two concentric diamond-shaped orbits in such a way that each half of the network is covered by a sink at a time. Initially, both sinks move in one direction and stay at particular intervals in the corners of the orbits to gather data from sensor nodes. When sinks are stationary, SCCs send data to the sinks directly, but MCCs apply the proposed routing algorithm (EGRPM) to send data to mobile sinks. The proposed approach is simulated by NS2 software. A comparison between the performance of EGRPM and conventional methods shows that applying EGRPM results in a significant decrease in average energy consumption and data delivery delay and causes a substantial increase in packet delivery rate and network lifetime.