BoSS: a moving strategy for mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

Since sink mobility can alleviate the effects of the hotspot problem in wireless sensor networks and improve network performance, it has attracted much research interest in recent years. Considering the unawareness of energy efficiency in random moving strategies and the lack of flexibility in fixed-track moving strategies, we propose an autonomous moving strategy for the mobile sinks in periodically data-gathering applications in this paper. We first suggest a data-gathering scheme for low-duty cycle sensor networks and then present a mechanics-inspired moving strategy, called BoSS. The moving strategy drives a sink to move towards the nodes with high residual energy and meanwhile, balances energy consumption among the nodes with low energy. Finally, we compare our moving strategy with three near-optimal fixed-track strategies by simulations. The results show that our strategy can not only extend network lifetime notably, but also provide scalability and topology adaptability.

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