Title: Wireless sensor network design by lifetime maximisation: an empirical evaluation of integrating major design issues and sink mobility

Authors: M. Emre Keskin; I. Kuban Altınel; Necati Aras; Cem Ersoy

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Boğaziçi University, İstanbul 34342, Turkey ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Boğaziçi University, İstanbul 34342, Turkey ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Boğaziçi University, İstanbul 34342, Turkey ' Department of Computer Engineering, Boğaziçi University, İstanbul 34342, Turkey

Abstract: The collective behaviour of wireless sensors provides a network to monitor a region. Most of the applications require a sufficiently long network operation, which makes the efficient management of the available energy resources an important issue. It is a known phenomenon that sensors communicating directly with a sink deplete their energy faster than others. Hence, some of the sinks are disconnected from the rest of the network even though most of the sensors are still functional. A possible remedy is to balance the relaying load of the sensors using mobile sinks and controlling their mobility. In this work, we consider three major design issues, i.e., coverage, locating mobile sinks, and routing sensor-to-sink data within a unified framework and develop mixed-integer linear programming formulations to maximise the network lifetime. We also numerically compare the new models and demonstrate the improvement obtained by controlling the sink mobility and integrating various design issues.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; network design; sensor deployment; activity scheduling; controlled sink mobility; lifetime maximisation; mixed-integer linear programming; MILP; network lifetime; network coverage; mobile sink location; sensor-to-sink routing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2016.075363

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2016 Vol.20 No.3, pp.131 - 146

Received: 14 Jun 2013
Accepted: 19 Mar 2014
Published online: 17 Mar 2016 *

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