On Maximizing the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks in Event-driven Applications with Mobile Sinks

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that utilizing a mobile sink (MS) to harvest and carry data from a wireless sensor network (WSN) can enhance network operations and increase the network lifetime. Since a significant portion of sensor nodes' energy is consumed for data transmission to an MS, the specific trajectory has a profound influence on the lifetime of a WSN. In this paper, we study the problem of controlling sink mobility in event-driven applications to achieve maximum network lifetime. In these applications, an MS with limited velocity has to harvest the captured data of events from a group of sensor nodes in a specific time as a reporting time slot. We show that this problem is NP-hard, and then, we propose a convex optimization model inspired by the support vector regression technique to determine an optimal trajectory of an MS without considering predefined structures such as a virtual grid or rendezvous points. The effectiveness of our approach is validated via the extensive number of simulation runs and comparison with other algorithms.