Energy-Efficient Routing Mechanism for Mobile Sink in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

One of the most effective approaches to increase the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), is the use of a mobile sink to collect data from sensor. In WSNs, mobile sinks implicitly help achieving uniform energy-consumption and provide load-balancing. In this approach, some certain points in the sensors field should be visited by the mobile sink. The optimal selection of these points which are also called rendezvous points is a NP-hard problem. Since hierarchical algorithms rely only on their local information to select these points, thus the probability of selecting an optimal node as rendezvous point will be very low. To address this problem, in this paper, a new method called particle swarm optimization based selection (PSOBS) is proposed to select the optimal rendezvous points. By applying PSO, the proposed method is capable of finding optimal or near-optimal rendezvous points to efficient management of network resources. In the proposed method, a weight value is also calculated for each sensor node based on the number of data packets that it receives from other sensor nodes. The proposed method was compared with weighted rendezvous planning based selection (WRPBS) algorithm based on some performance metrics such as throughput, energy consumption, number of rendezvous points and hop count. The simulation results show the superiority of PSOBS as compared with WRPBS, but it increases the packet loss rate in comparison with WRPBS.