Moving Schemes for Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

In a wireless sensor network for data-gathering applications, if all network data congregate to a stationary sink node hop by hop, the sensor nodes near the sink have to consume more energy on forwarding data for other nodes, which probably causes the early function loss of the sensor network. Employing a mobile sink can alleviate the hotspot problem and balance the energy consumption among the sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose two autonomous moving schemes for the mobile sink. In our schemes, the sink makes moving decisions without complete knowledge of network topology and the energy distribution of all sensor nodes. We evaluated the performance of our moving schemes by simulation and the results show that both the two schemes can extend the network lifetime prominently.