Balancing the utilization of mobile sensor nodes through geneticbased clustering

Mobile sensor networks (MSNs) can be deployed in remote places and in disaster relief scenarios, where a structured infrastructure is not available. The mobility of the nodes increases the transmission power requirements as the topology of the network continuously evolves and routing paths become obsolete. This is of major concern since the lifetime of the battery-operated devices depends on the power consumption of each node and the main contributor of this comes from transmission requirements. In this paper we apply a genetic algorithm to cluster nodes in such a way that network coverage is optimized. This leads to shorter transmission paths, reducing the required transmit power. Clustering is also altered during operation such that overall homogenous node power consumption occurs as the nodes move within the network and the power of the cluster heads diminishes. Thus, the mobile nodes are more evenly utilized during the lifetime of the network. Results show that the proposed solution manages to achieve a 52% increase in lifetime before the first node dies compared to the standard cluster-based routing protocol.