An Improved Stable Election Based Routing Protocol with Mobile Sink for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the nonuniform distribution of wireless sensor nodes, unbalanced energy consumption has become a major research problem for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Traditional clustered networks with fixed sink nodes always suffer from high energy burden during multihop transmission. Recent researches show promising advantages by introducing mobile sink(s) to networks with benefits of low latency, low energy consumption, and long lifetime, etc. In this paper, we propose a mobile sink based improved stable election protocol with nonuniform node distribution for WSNs, which selects cluster heads primary based on the fraction of advanced nodes with additional energy, and secondary on the residual energy. Besides, cluster heads select routing path to mobile sink based on comparison between its distance to the trajectory and distance to the nearest cluster head. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm has better performance than traditional routing algorithms such as LEACH and SEP.