Inter- and intra-cluster movement of mobile sink algorithms for cluster-based networks to enhance the network lifetime

Abstract Due to limited resources of the sensor nodes energy efficiency is an important performance metric to evaluate the wireless sensor networks (WSN). In cluster-based WSNs, the cluster heads (CH) located around base station (BS) consume more energy and exhaust their energy supplies faster than other ones which leads to energy hole problem and premature network death. Furthermore, single-hop transmission manner is usually applied for intra-cluster communication, therefore the member nodes (MN) located farther away from CHs die sooner than other MNs, which leads to coverage holes and reduce the network performance. In this paper, we propose mobile sink (MS) based inter- and intra-cluster routing algorithms. The first algorithm aims to solve the unbalanced energy consumption of CHs, which results in enhanced network lifetime. Likewise, the goal of the second algorithm is to balance the energy consumption of MNs, which results in improved coverage time of the network. In the proposed mechanism, MSs move along clusters and stay in each cluster for a limited sojourn time calculated via first algorithm. Then, the optimal sojourn positions of MSs in the clusters are determined via second algorithm. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithms enhance the network performance in terms of different performance evaluation metrics.