Collaborative Mobile Sink Sojourn Time Optimization Scheme for Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have grown excessively due to their various applications and low installation cost. One of the design challenges of the WSNs is to balance the energy consumption among sensor nodes, which results in enhanced network lifetime. In the past few years, several mobile sink (MS)-based schemes exclusively focus on determining the optimal sojourn time of MS to balance the energy consumption among cluster heads (CH). However, most of them are evaluated under unpredictable mobility pattern. Although they significantly improve the network lifetime, however, unpredictable mobility pattern imposes extra overheads on the network. Therefore, collaborative mobile sink sojourn time optimization (CMS2TO) scheme is proposed in this paper. The CMS2TO aims to optimize the sojourn time of MS in each cluster in order to achieve a balanced lifetime of CHs belonging to different layers of the network. The main contribution of the CMS2TO is to utilize a collaborative mechanism in order to determine the optimal sojourn time of MS in each cluster. In fact, in the proposed scheme, the CHs belonging to other layers cooperate in calculating the sojourn time of MS at the residence cluster. Based on experimental results, the proposed CMS2TO enhances the network performance in terms of different performance evaluation metrics.