Impact of Sink Mobility on Network Performance in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of distributed sensors nodes, each of which is capable of performing computational operations, storage and communication capability. Extending network lifetime and energy efficiency are important objectives and challenges in wireless sensor networks. The nodes near the sink are more likely to use up their energy because they have to forward all the data generated by the nodes farther away. With a mobile sink, the nodes around the sink always changes, thus balancing the energy consumption in the network and improving the network lifetime. Mobile sinks reduce end to end delay, increases success rate and decreases energy dissipation in wireless sensor networks. We evaluate the effect of sink mobility pattern on network lifetime in wireless sensor networks.