An Energy-Balanced Path Plan Strategy for Mobile Sensor Networks

Several studies have demonstrated that significant energy consumption reduction of nodes and network energy hole elimination can be achieved by introducing a mobile sink. In most related researches, mobile sink's energy is always assumed to be sufficient to collect data sensed by normal nodes. However, mobile sink consumes large amounts of energy in practical applications and it is impossible to own infinite energy. Correspondingly, the moving path plan of the mobile sink, which can be treated as a TSP (Travelling Salesman Problem), plays an important role in reducing and balancing network energy consumption. In this paper, an energy efficient mobile sink path planning strategy (EEPP) is proposed. In this strategy, LEACH protocol is introduced to balance the static network energy consumption; A heuristic path optimization method is utilized to further shorten the mobile sink path and reduce network latency. Simulation results show that our algorithm has good performance on the network energy consumption balancing, thus extending the network lifetime.