An Efficient Path Generation Algorithm Using Principle Component Analysis for Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, the data collection problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) using mobile sinks has received much attention. The main challenge in such problems is constructing the path that the mobile sink (MS) will use to collect the data. In this paper, an efficient path generation algorithm for the mobile sink based on principal component analysis (PCA) is proposed. The proposed approach was evaluated using two data collection modes—direct and multihop—and it was compared with another approach called the mobile-sink-based energy-efficient clustering algorithm for wireless sensor networks (MECA). When compared with MECA, simulation results have shown that the proposed approach improves the performance of WSN in terms of the number of live nodes and average remaining energy.