Multiple Mobile Sinks Positioning in Wireless Sensor Networks for Buildings

Real deployment of wireless sensor networks inside buildings is a very challenging. In fact, in such networks, a large number of small sensor devices suffer from limited energy supply. These sensors have to observe and monitor their in-door environment, and then to report the data collected to a nearest information collector, referred to as the sink node. Sensor nodes which are far away from the sink relay their data via multiple hops to reach the sink. This way of communication makes the sensors near the sink deplete their energy much faster than distant nodes because they carry heavier traffic. So what is known as a hole appears around the sink and prevents distant nodes to send their data. Consequently the network lifetime ends prematurely. One efficient solution for this problem is to relocate sinks. In this work, we aim to find the best way to relocate sinks by determining their optimal locations and the duration of their sojourn time. So, we propose an integer linear programming for multiple mobile sinks which directly maximizes the network lifetime instead of minimizing the energy consumption or maximizing the residual energy, which is what was done in previous solutions. Simulations results show that with our solution, the network lifetime is extended and the energy depletion is more balanced among the nodes. We also show that relocating mobile sinks inside a whole network is more efficient than relocating mobile sinks inside different clusters and we can achieve almost 52% network lifetime improvement in our experiments.