EEDARS: An Energy-Efficient Dual-Sink Algorithm with Role Switching Mechanism for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy conservation is a vital issue in wireless sensor networks. Recently, employing mobile sinks for data gathering become a pervasive trend to deal with this problem. The sink can follow stochastic or pre-defined paths; however the controlled mobility pattern nowadays is taken more into consideration. In this method, the sink moves across the network autonomously and changes its position based on the energy factors. Although the sink mobility would reduce nodes’ energy consumption and enhance the network lifetime, the overhead caused by topological changes could waste unnecessary power through the sensor field. In this paper, we proposed EEDARS, an energy-efficient dual-sink algorithm with role switching mechanism which utilizes both static and mobile sinks. The static sink is engaged to avoid any periodic flooding for sink localization, while the mobile sink adaptively moves towards the event region for data collection. Furthermore, a role switching mechanism is applied to the protocol in order to send the nearest sink to the recent event area, hence shorten the path. This algorithm could be employed in event-driven and multi-hop scenarios. Analytical model and extensive simulation results for EEDARS demonstrate a significant improvement on the network metrics especially the lifetime, the load and the end-to-end delay.