Energy Efficient Routing Algorithm with Mobile Sink Support for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, wireless sensor network (WSN) has drawn wide attention. It can be viewed as a network with lots of sensors that are autonomously organized and cooperate with each other to collect, process, and transmit data around targets to some remote administrative center. As such, sensors may be deployed in harsh environments where it is impossible for battery replacement. Therefore, energy efficient routing is crucial for applications that introduce WSNs. In this paper, we present an energy efficient routing schema combined with clustering and sink mobility technology. We first divide the whole sensor field into sectors and each sector elects a Cluster Head (CH) by calculating its members’ weight. Member nodes calculate energy consumption of different routing paths to choose the optimal scenario. Then CHs are connected into a chain using the greedy algorithm for intercluster communication. Simulation results prove the presented schema outperforms some similar work such as Cluster-Chain Mobile Agent Routing (CCMAR) and Energy-efficient Cluster-based Dynamic Routing Algorithm (ECDRA). Additionally, we explore the influence of different network parameters on the performance of the network and further enhance its performance.