Algorithms for sink mobility in wireless sensor networks to improve network lifetime

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes organized in an ad-hoc manner to achieve a predefined goal. Although WSNs have limitations in terms of memory and processor, the main constraint that makes WSNs different from traditional networks is the battery problem. Since sensor nodes are generally deployed to areas with harsh environmental conditions, replacing the exhausted batteries become practically impossible. This requires to use the energy very carefully in both node and network level. Different approaches are proposed in the literature for improving network lifetime, including data aggregation, energy efficient routing schemes and MAC protocols, etc. Main motivation for these approaches is to prolong the network lifetime without sacrificing service quality. Sink (data collection node) mobility is also one of the effective solutions in the literature for network lifetime improvement. In this thesis, we focus on the controlled sink mobility and present a set of algorithms for different parts of the problem, like sink sites determination, and movement decision parameters. Moreover, a load balanced topology construction algorithm is given as another component of network lifetime improvement. Experiment results are presented which compare the performance of different components of the mobility scheme with other approaches in the literature, and the whole sink mobility scheme with random movement and static sink cases. As a result, it is observed that our algorithms perform better than random movement and static cases for different scenarios.