DMGR: a Multipath Geographic Routing Strategy with the On-demand Mobile Sink in WSN
Li Yu, Zhen-Fei Wang, Xiao-Fei Nan and Bing Zhou
The sensor is a battery-operated device which sends data to the sink node through single or multiple hops, resulting in unequal energy depletion of the sink’s neighbors. The introduction of mobile sinks, therefore, is vital in many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. However, if the sink moves with high frequency, it causes frequent updates of neighbor and routing list, which also increases the overall network power consumption. This paper proposes a multipath geographic routing strategy with the on-demand mobile sink. The strategy involves three phases to realize sink’s on-demand mobility that does guarantee minimum energy consumption and, therefore, prolong network lifetime. At the path selection phase, the improved Tabu search algorithm is employed for searching the globally optimal path set, which is extended to a large-scale network. Our approach also develops a multi-objective optimization framework and exploits the health index of link model combined with the principle of buckets effect in economics for the trade-off between the energy consumption and the performance preferences of different applications such as reliability and real-time character under consideration. We present a thorough proof that the proposed novel strategy has a higher energy efficiency, and its network lifetime is approximately four times as those in static sensor network with the fixed sink. The results we obtained in extensive simulations outperform the benchmark approaches such as the DD algorithm.
Keywords: WSN; mobile sink; optimization; tabu search algorithm; network lifetime; energy consumption.