An efficient technique of scheduling mobile sinks in hybrid WSN

In the hybrid wireless sensor networks, mobile sinks move to pre-specified sink locations to gather sensory data provided by static sensors. In this setting, scheduling mobile sinks efficiently while prolonging the lifetime of network is a challenge. To remedy this problem, we propose a three-phase energy-balanced heuristic in this paper. We firstly divide the hybrid WSN into grid cells, cluster these grids into clusters according to data communication consumption, and then rebalance these clusters with considering movement consumption by a heuristics algorithm. Therefore, all clusters are balanced in energy consumption when considering the cost of both data gathering and sinks movement. The evaluation results indicate that our technique can compute an optimal grid division within limited time of iterations.