Impact of Sink Mobility on Quality of Service Performance and Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Network with Cluster Based Routing Protocols
Abdelbari Ben Yagouta, Maher Jabberi, Bechir Ben Gouissem · 2017
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network with limited power sensing devices with a communications infrastructure for monitoring physical or environmental conditions. The main concern of WSN is the energy consumption especially during routing of collected data to sink. In this context, cluster based routing protocols have shown considerable conservation of energy by reducing the number of transmitter nodes. On the other hand, the optimal deployment of the sink in the controlled field can also conserve network energy by reducing distances between the emitting nodes and the sink. However, deploy a sink in the middle of the controlled field is almost impossible for WSN applications such as battlefield control, the control of seismic, volcanic and toxic zone. Several works have shown that the use of a mobile sink can save this situation, by providing energy conservation similar to a sink centered in the field. However, these works did not focus on the impact of sink mobility on quality of service metrics, which is of considerable importance especially for real-time applications. In this paper, we will study the impact of sink mobility on energy consumption and QoS metrics in WSN with hierarchical routing protocols under various scenarios. Simulation results have shown that sink mobility improves energy consumption, throughput, reliability and packets latency, compared to a sink located outside the field, and may even give better results than a centered sink. Nevertheless, with high node densities and high packet rate, latency and reliability abruptly degrade.