Energy-Efficient Mobile-Sink Sojourn Location Optimization Scheme for Consumer Home Networks

With the fast development of wireless communication and semiconductor devices, home networking has gained considerable attention in the past few years. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Sensing coverage is known as one of the most important standards in evaluating the performance of WSNs. The sensor nodes may have failures due to energy depletion during their service life which leads to incomplete coverage of the sensing area and coverage holes in the network which results in reducing the network performance. Therefore, designing an energy-efficient solution to prevent the coverage holes is vital. Employing Mobile Sink (MS) is a popular technique to enhance the energy efficiency of the network. Furthermore, sojourn location optimization is one of the main design issues of mobility based schemes. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of existing sojourn location optimization-based schemes are specially designed for homogeneous networks and much less attention has been devoted to optimizing this parameter in heterogeneous networks. Therefore, the aim behind this paper is to optimize the sojourn location of MS in a heterogeneous home network, which results in improving the coverage time and the performance of the network. Based on the experimental results, the scheme proposed in this paper remarkably improves the balanced energy consumption, which leads to enhanced network lifetime and performance.