Mobile Sink based Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensors Network consists of small electro-mechanical devices called sensor nodes which are capable of sensing, computing and communicating data packets from harsh physical environments like a battle field. These sensor nodes consist of batteries for energy, which get discharged at a faster rate because of the operations like computation and communication they have to perform. Mainly routing protocols are designed for efficient utilization of energy resources. However, sensor networks with one fixed sink node
often suffer from a hot spots problem since nodes near sinks have more traffic burden to forward during a multi-hop transmission process. The use of mobile sinks has been shown to be an effective technique to enhance network performance features such as latency, energy efficiency, network lifetime, etc. In this paper, a modified Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), which employs a mobile sink, has been proposed for WSNs with non-uniform node distribution. The decision of selecting cluster heads by the sink is based on the minimization of the associated additional energy and residual energy at each node. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm has better performance than traditional routing algorithms, such as LEACH.