Base-station repositioning for optimized performance of sensor networks

Most of the energy aware routing approaches for unattended wireless sensor networks pursue multi-hop paths in order to minimize the total transmission power. Since almost in all sensor networks data are routed towards a single sink (base-station), hops close to that sink become heavily involved in packet forwarding and thus their batteries get depleted rather quickly. In this paper we investigate the potential of base-station repositioning for enhanced network performance. We address issues related to when should the base-station be relocated, where it would be moved to and how to handle its motion without any effect on data traffic. Our approach tracks the distance from the closest hops to the base-station and the traffic density through these hops. When a hop that forward high traffic is further than a threshold the base-station qualifies the impact of the relocation on the network performance and moves if the overhead is justified. The presented approach is validated in a simulated environment.