Energy-aware sensor-to-sink binding in WSNs

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy is dissipated mainly when sensors are communicating with sinks. As a result, multiple sinks are deployed in the network in order to increase its coverage area and shorten the communication distance between these two entities. This raises the issue of how best to bind sensors to sinks without overloading any sink. In this paper, we solve the sensor-to-sink binding problem by formulating it as a constrained optimization problem. In other words, we aim to find the optimal binding of sensors to sinks in order to minimize the energy consumption in WSNs. We implement the proposed solution using the GUROBI optimization tool. To assess the optimality of our formulation, we first run several tests using the binary vector representing sensor to sink binding and considering different topologies in which sensors and sinks scatter randomly, then we run another group of tests with continuous variables. Preliminary results show that the proposed solution can reduce power consumption of the different network entities.