Finding the Minimum Number of Mobile Sinks for Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the sensor nodes are equipped with a limited energy battery, and it is crucial to minimize the energy consumption to prolong the network lifetime. In this context, the mobile sink is used to collect the data by visiting the SNs to reduce relay nodes’ burden. In contrast, the relay nodes communicate the data to the base station via multi-hop communication. A finite number of sensor nodes are deployed in a large area, and a mobile sink is not sufficient to collect the data with no loss. So, we require multiple mobile sinks to achieve a better data gathering process without data loss. However, increasing the number of mobile sinks will also increase the cost. So, deciding the minimum number of mobile sinks to collect the network’s data efficiently is challenging. This paper proposes a heuristic approach to find the minimum number of mobile sinks required to acquire the network data efficiently. We perform a close approximation of minimum perfect matching in the heuristic approach, followed by an Euler circuit to achieve the goal. We simulate the proposed and recent existing algorithm using Python, and the proposed work outperforms the existing one.