Impact of mobile sink on grid topology of wireless sensor network

Motivated by the news in the local newspaper that there was occurrence of elephant moving out from their conservation area in Lampung province of Indonesia, this paper proposes the use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) as a monitoring system that is applicable for monitoring elephant movement in the conservation area. This paper studied the effect of mobile sink node on that WSN system. Modeling and simulation have been carried out to evaluate the system. The area of conservation was modeled as a square area with a grid topology of WSN inside the square area. At the first, it was applied a static sink node to collect the sensed data of sensor nodes. The WSN with single static sink node was used as a baseline system. And then, the static sink node was replaced by a mobile sink node for the purpose to improve the energy efficiency in order to lengthen the lifetime of WSN. The extensive simulation was carried out to examine both WSN systems with static sink node and with mobile sink node. The simulation results for the designed network topology show the significant improvement comparing the one with mobile sink node and another one with static sink node. It was achieved the improvement of network lifetime by the factor of 9.26.