A new efficient path design algorithm for wireless sensor networks with a mobile sink

Introducing mobility for sink can effectively solve many problems existing in the traditional wireless sensor networks with a fixed sink. However, because of the speed limit, the mobile sink has to take a long time to visit all nodes, which can not meet most applications´ requirements for data latency. To address this issue, this paper proposes an efficient path design algorithm based on Virtual Grids and the Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm (VG-AFSA). VG-AFSA divides nodes into groups with virtual grids to scale down the space of searching optimal set of visited-nodes, then utilizes AFSA to do searching. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm has a better energy effectiveness compared with CPUG, and moreover, significantly lowers computation complexity and has a good scalability to network size.