A Mobile-Sink Based Energy Efficiency Clustering Routing Algorithm for WSNs in Coal Mine

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an important application for real time monitoring and detecting the phenomenon in a coal mine, which can ensure the workers´ life safety and reduce the financial loss. But the drawback of WSNs is that the nodes are easy to die. To balance the traffic load and optimize the networks´ routing seems more important. Clustering is an effective approach to prolong the network lifetime, but many existing clustering algorithms has a static sink node, which will result in a hot spots problem. In order to deal this problem, in this paper, we propose a mobile-sink based energy efficiency clustering routing protocol (MEC), it considers nodes´ residual energy and uses a mobile sink to gather the data from the cluster heads. Simulation results reveal that our protocol is better than previous routing algorithms.