An Optimal Sink Selection Scheme for Multi-sink Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of sensor nodes and sink nodes. Due to the variety of applications, the interconnection between wireless sensor networks and Internet is needed. In order to have the access to the Internet, a sensor node must select a sink node as the gateway to the Internet. The selection of sink has great influence on the delivery latency and network efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel sink selection scheme which take transmission latency and sink forwarding latency into consideration. The optimal sink for the sensor node is the closest sink that has the least wait send packets. Simulation results demonstrate that this scheme has a low sink discovery overhead, a low end-to-end packet delivery latency, and a good packet delivery ratio.