A Distributed Algorithm for Maximum Lifetime Routing in Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

This paper considers an interferencefree wireless sensor network that consists of battery-operated nodes which can route information to a mobile sink in a multi-hop fashion. The problem of maximizing the network's lifetime, defined as the time when the first node runs out of energy, subject to power/energy constraints is cast into a linear program and solved via dual formulation. The unknowns are the sink sojourn times and the routing flow vector for each sink location. A distributed algorithm based on the subgradient method and using the sink as leader is proposed and its performance is evaluated through simulation for random networks. The algorithm's requirements in memory and message exchanges are also provided.