A myopic mobile sink migration strategy for maximizing lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Network lifetime maximization is challenging particularly for large-scale wireless sensor networks. The sensor nodes near the sink node tend to suffer high energy consumption due to heavy traffic relay operations, becoming vulnerable to energy depletion. The rationale of the sink mobility approach is that as the sink node moves around, such risk of energy depletion at some nodes can be alleviated. In this paper, we first obtain the optimal mobile sink sojourning pattern by solving a linear programming model and then we mathematically analyze why the optimal solution exhibits such sojourning pattern. We use the insights from this analysis to design a simple practical heuristic algorithm for sink mobility, which utilizes only local information. Our heuristic is very different from the existing algorithms which often use the traffic volume as the main decision factor, in that we consider the variance of residual energy of neighboring sensor nodes. The simulation results show that our scheme achieves near-optimal network lifetime even with the relatively low moving speed of the mobile sink.