Minimum spanning tree for clustered heterogeneous sensor networks with mobile sink

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of battery powered sensor nodes with sensing, computing and communication infrastructure. The sensors are randomly deployed in the sensing field and are organized as clusters. Clustering helps to improve the lifetime of WSNs. Most of the existing sensor networks are homogeneous where the Cluster Heads (CHs) are changed periodically. This paper aims at introducing a new path finding algorithm for the mobile sink and to maximize the lifetime of Heterogeneous Sensor Networks (HSN). It considers a fixed number of CH and hence overhead and energy consumption gets reduced, which in turn increases the lifetime. Since the mobile sink traverses a subset of CH nodes to collect the data, the lifetime of CH nodes gets increased. From the simulation results, it is inferred that the proposed algorithm increases the lifetime of HSN.