Congestion Avoidance and Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with aMobile Sink

Abstract

Congestion severely affects the performance of a wireless sensor network in two aspects: increased data loss and reduced lifetime. This paper addresses these problems by introducing a mobile sink based routing scheme for congestion avoidance and energy efficient routing in wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme utilizes the sink mobility and an in-network storage model that is used to set up mini-sinks along the mobility trajectory of the sink. Mini-sinks are responsible for collecting data from the sensor nodes located in their vicinity, thus avoiding data flow to a single data collection point, e.g., a static sink that is the major cause of congestion, data loss and reduced lifetime of the sensor network. Also, in the proposed scheme data only has to travel a limited number of hops to reach the nearest mini-sink which helps to improve the energy consumption of the sensor nodes. Through simulation we show the effectiveness of the given routing scheme in terms of congestion avoidance and increased lifetime of the wireless sensor network.