Energy Efficient Schemes for Exploiting Dual Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of small sensor nodes in a geographically distributed region to keep track of physical or environmental conditions. If each node in the network transmits the sensed data to the Base Station (BS), the energy consumption is very high which directly affects the network lifetime. By using clustering techniques, network lifetime can be extended by making Cluster Head (CH) to interconnect with BS on behalf of other cluster members. Clustering is done and CHs are selected based on the Residual Energy (RE) parameter. A Dual Mobile Sink scheme is proposed where the sink nodes have more energy and resources compared to other sensor nodes. The sink nodes moves near the clusters and gathers the sensed data from the CH. Simulation results and analysis shows that there is an improvement in throughput, delay, packet delivery ratio with reduction in energy consumption compared to schemes that use static sink or BS, where all the CHs communicate the gathered data from the clusters members to the static sink node. Thus mobile sink scheme increases the network lifetime by reducing energy consumption.