Heuristics for Lifetime Maximization in Wireless Sensor Networks with Multiple Mobile Sinks

This paper investigates heuristics to control and coordinate the concurrent movement of multiple sinks for lifetime maximization in a wireless sensor network (WSN). We have developed a centralized heuristic that runs in polynomial time given the solution to the linear program from [1] which provides a provable upper bound to the problem of controlled mobility of multiple sinks. The centralized heuristic solves the sink movement and placement problem obtaining lifetimes that are within 2% of the upper bound. We also define a deployable distributed heuristic for coordinating the motion of multiple sinks through the network. The performance comparison of our heuristics with static sink placement and with random sink mobility shows that our distributed heuristic achieves network lifetimes that are remarkably close to the optimum ones, resulting in significant lifetime improvements over random sink mobility (+77.7%) and statically deployed sinks (+382.4%).