Coordinated movement of multiple mobile sinks in a wireless sensor network for improved lifetime

Sink mobility is one of the most effective solutions for improving lifetime and has been widely investigated for the last decade. Algorithms for single-sink mobility are not directly applied to the multiple-sink case due to the latter’s specific challenges. Most of the approaches proposed in the literature use mathematical programming techniques to solve the multiple-sink mobility problem. However, doing so leads to higher complexities when traffic flow information for any possible sink-site combinations is included in the model. In this paper, we propose two algorithms that do not consider all possible sink-site combinations to determine migration points. We first present a centralized movement algorithm that uses an energy-cost matrix for a user-defined threshold number of combinations to coordinate multiple-sink movement. We also give a distributed algorithm that does not use any prior network information and has a low message exchange overhead. Our simulations show that the centralized algorithm gives better network lifetime performance compared to previously proposed MinDiff-RE, random movement, and static-sink algorithms. Our distributed algorithm has a lower network lifetime than centralized algorithms; sinks travel significantly less than in all the other schemes.