An energy and coverage sensitive approach to hierarchical data collection for mobile sink based wireless sensor networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks experience the energy hole problem as the most critical issue due to the heavy data forwarding load on the proximate sensor nodes to the sink. The best known solution found by the current state-of-the-art approaches for the energy hole problem is the Mobile Sink (MS) strategy. However, allowing the MS to visit every node for data collection incurs high data delivery latency, which may not be feasible in delay-sensitive applications. Thus, in this paper, restricted mobile sink motion is considered, where the MS halts at a limited number of locations stated as sojourn locations and all nodes disseminate their data to the nearby sojourn locations. The data dissemination to the sojourn location is achieved via a cluster-based routing protocol which aims to preserve the sensor nodes’ energy to enhance the network lifetime. Furthermore, analogous to network lifetime, extending the coverage lifetime is of equal importance in many coverage sensitive applications of WSN. Thus, this article incorporates the coverage parameter to the proposed protocol in order to preserve the network coverage despite certain nodes die. Based on the sojourn locations, the proposed routing algorithm ensures that each cluster data is disseminated to the MS following the minimum hop path to limit the data delivery delay. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed protocol over several state-of-the-art protocols with respect to different metrics like network lifetime, coverage ratio, energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, etc.