Adaptive Energy-Aware Gathering Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy hole problem is considered one of the most severe threats in wireless sensor networks. In this paper the idea of exploiting sink mobility for the purpose of culling the energy hole problem in hierarchical large-scale wireless sensor networks based on bees algorithm is presented. In the proposed scheme, a mobile sink equipped with a powerful transceiver and battery, traverses the entire field, and periodically gathers data from network cluster heads. The mobile sink follows an adaptive gathering strategy resilient to both connected and disconnected networks. The proposed gathering strategy geared to eliminate multihop relays required by all cluster heads to reach the mobile sink, balancing the traffic load across all network heads, meanwhile, reducing the loss that data may incur due to buffer overflow. Furthermore, enabling the mobile sink to navigate safely within cluttered and uncluttered fields augments the proposed gathering strategy. Extensive simulations are conducted in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The achieved results show an improvement in overall system performance compared to other mobility strategies.