Zone based gateway patrolling in Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), sensor nodes deliver sensed data back to the gateway node through multi hopping. The sensor nodes that are close to the gateway node become heavily involved in packet forwarding and it spends more battery power than others. Therefore, these nodes will quickly drain out their battery energy and decrease the network lifetime of the WSN. To increase network lifetime of the WSN, the concept of gateway patrolling is launched. In this paper, we propose Zone Based Gateway Patrolling (ZBGP) for mobile gateway in WSNs. In ZBGP, gateway node is moved towards the area of the sensors that generates more number of data packets (heavily loaded zone). The simulation results show that patrolling the gateway node towards the most number of packets attains significant energy savings as compared to the static approach which helps to improve the life of the entire network.