A Hexagonal Grid Based Sink Relocation Method in Wireless Sensor Networks

As the short-distance and multiple-hop communication way in wireless sensor networks, the closer a sensor node lies to the sink, the more it will be shared by communication paths, which make its energy drained more quickly. Such unbalanced energy consumption among nodes will lead to network performance decline. Sink relocation can effectively balance energy consumption, and thus improve the network performance and prolong the network lifetime. We propose a hexagonal grid based sink relocation method (HGSR), which utilizes the mathematical properties of the honeycomb mesh and adjust the transmission radius according to residual energy state. Simulation results show the proposed HGSR reach better performance comparing to several existing sink relocation methods.