Energy efficient path selection for mobile sink and data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Mobile sink (MS) has drawn significant attention for solving hot spot problem (also known as energy hole problem) that results from multihop data collection using static sink in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). MS is regarded as a potential solution towards this problem as it significantly reduces energy consumption of the sensor nodes and thus enhances network lifetime. In this paper, we first propose an algorithm for designing efficient trajectory for MS, based on rendezvous points (RPs). We next propose another algorithm for the same problem which considers delay bound path formation of the MS. Both the algorithms use k-means clustering and a weight function by considering several network parameters for efficient selection of the RPs by ensuring the coverage of the entire network. We also propose an MS scheduling technique for effective data gathering. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through rigorous simulations and comparisons with some of the existing algorithms over several performance metrics.