Prolonging lifetime via mobility and load-balanced routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the main challenges for a sensor network is conserving the available energy at each sensor node and then prolonging the network lifetime. Many energy efficient/conserving routing protocols have been proposed to the issue; however, the ldquofunnelling effectrdquo in multi-hop communications which describes the convergence of data traffic towards the static sinks (Base Stations) remains a major threat to the network lifetime. This is because the sensor nodes located near a base station have to relay data for those nodes that are farther away. In this paper, we introduce a few mobile elements, named aggregators into network and study their mobility strategies. In particular, we propose a Local Aggregator Deployment Protocol for Energy Conservation (LADPEC) and consider the integration of mobility and routing algorithms for lifetime elongation. Based on the simulation results, we show that joint mobility and routing would significantly increase the lifetime of network.