Joint Sensor Energy Conservation and Mobile Sink Cooperation for Data Collection in WSNs

Data collection is an important issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In literature, a large number of existing studies have been proposed. These studies can be further classified into two categories: static sink and mobile sink. In the studies of considering static sink, sensors transmit their readings in a multi-hop manner which leads to the energy unbalanced problem because that the sensors closer to the sink have heavy forwarding loads. To cope with this problem, some other studies adopted mobile sink to visit some collection points which are selected from sensors. All the other sensors transmit their data to the collection points and the collection points directly transmit data to the mobile sink when they are visited. However, most of them considered a mobile sink which constrains the number of visited anchors due to limited path length. This paper considers multiple sinks and explores the cooperation opportunities among the mobile sinks, aiming to prolong the network lifetime of the given WSNs. Performance experiments show that the proposed mechanism outperforms the related studies in terms of energy consumptions of sensors and efficiency index.