Prolonging network lifetime through the use of mobile base station in wireless sensor networks

Prolonging network lifetime is one of the most important design objectives in energy-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Using a mobile instead of a static base station (BS) to reduce or alleviate the non-uniform energy consumption among sensor nodes is an efficient mechanism to prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we deal with the problem of prolonging network lifetime in data gathering by employing a mobile BS. To achieve that, we devise a novel clustering-based heuristic algorithm for finding a trajectory of the mobile BS that strikes the trade-off between the traffic load among sensor nodes and the tour time constraint of the mobile BS. We also conduct experiments by simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the use of clustering in conjunction with a mobile BS for data gathering can prolong network lifetime significantly.