Data gathering in Wireless Sensor Network using optimum mobile sink path

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of nodes geographically distributed in a remote and hostile region to monitor certain real time events. Sensor nodes collect the sensed data, process and forward it to the sink or base station using multi-hop transmission. Each sensor node is equipped with a battery which, in most cases, is impractical or infeasible to replace manually. Thus, one of the important research issues in WSN is minimizing energy dissipation that reduces the network lifetime. In WSNs with stationary sink, nodes near the sink forward more traffic than farther away nodes due to multi-hop forwarding. As a result, nodes near the sink deplete their energy faster than farther away nodes thereby reducing the WSN lifetime. To address this issue, an optimum mobile sink path based data gathering is proposed where a mobile sink follows the optimum path to collect the sensed data in a large-scale WSN.