An Optimal Data Gathering Method for Mobile Sinks in WSNs

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), energy is one of the most important resources since each node collects, processes and transmits data to its base station. Most of the traditional works in WSNs are consisted of static nodes and one base station. Recently, some mobile data gathering methods are proposed to prolong the operation time of sensor networks. One or more mobile collectors are used to gather sensed data from sensor nodes at short transmission ranges. This paper presents to find optimal visiting points and data gathering path for a mobile sink within clusters. With defining an optimal clustering and data gathering path, this method improves the data collection performance as well as the network lifetime extension of sensor networks. The network lifetime is increased to 20% when sensor nodes are divided into from 4 clusters to 15 clusters.