Fuzzy logic-based clustering approach with mobile sink for WSNs

One of the solutions that have been proposed in order to prolong the lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the use of mobile sinks. Depending on the application, mobile sinks can be used in WSNs for different objectives. In some applications, mobile sinks are used for increasing the coverage of the sensor field. Other applications employ them as data collectors. Whatever the application is, the main issue in utilizing the advantage of mobile sinks is the design of the path that the sink will follow in the senor field. In this paper, we use fuzzy logic in order to control the movement of the mobile sink while it collects the data from the sensor nodes. During the network operation and for every R rounds, a new position of the mobile sink is calculated using fuzzy logic. The calculation of the new position is considered a fuzzy logic-based decision which depends on the remaining energy of the sensor nodes and the current distance of the mobile sink relative to the sensor nodes. The proposed approach was compared with an approach that uses static sink and with an approach that uses random movement of the mobile sink. Simulation results have shown that the proposed approach outperforms the other approaches in terms of the remaining energy and the number of alive nodes during the network operation.