Energy efficient protocol in wireless sensor networks using mobile base station

A wireless sensor network is made up of battery operated devices that have sensing, processing and transmitting capabilities. The design constraint of a wireless sensor network is its network lifetime. In order to prolong the network lifetime, the sensor nodes must be able to use the minimal energy to transmit data to the base station. Hence, an efficient protocol is needed. One method to reduce the energy consumption among sensor nodes is to use mobile base station instead of static base station. This approach allows the base station to move closer to sensor nodes in order to reduce the communication distance between them. Consequently, it decreases the energy utilisation of the network. Another approach is by using the clustering method in which the sensor nodes in a network are grouped into clusters and only the cluster heads relay the aggregated data to the base station. However, this approach would be a burden to the cluster heads. Hence, the task of the cluster head could be alternated among sensor nodes so that the energy load among all sensor nodes is balanced. This paper proposes an energy efficient protocol for wireless sensor networks using mobile base station which is based on the clustering approach with role rotation.