Fuzzy logic-driven multi-criteria decision-making for multi-sink placement in WSNs
Ali Abdi Seyedkolaei · Journal of the Operational Research Society · 2025
Efficient placement of sinks is critical in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to optimise energy consumption, reduce data transmission delays, improve load balancing, and increase network survivability. Relying on a single sink often leads to congestion and sink overflow, especially in large or busy environments. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage approach based on Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (FMCDM) for the optimal placement of multiple sinks and the assignment of sensors to these sinks. The network is divided into sub-areas, and in each sub-area, criteria such as energy efficiency, delay, data transmission reliability, distance to the base station, and proximity to neighboring sinks are considered to select the most suitable cluster head sink. A mathematical optimisation model is used to minimise the overall energy consumption and ensure error-resistant connectivity. We validate the proposed method through extensive simulations with six network topologies, including three from the Internet Topology Zoo (Uran, SwitchL3, and Sinet) and three large-scale randomly generated topologies. The results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods—MPAR, EMPAR, and MOSR—on several metrics. In addition, the probability of connection failures, network delay, and mean load balancing error are significantly reduced, especially in dense topologies.