Lifetime-optimal sensor deployment for wireless sensor networks with mobile sink

The energy restriction of battery powered sensors is a big challenge for wireless sensor networks as it is difficult or in some cases not feasible to change the power supply of motes. Therefore, how to minimize the energy consumption while maintaining an extended network lifetime becomes the most critical issue. In this paper, a new sensor deployment method is proposed for wireless sensor networks, where a mobile sink is responsible for collecting the information from the sensors. We first study the mobile sink model, and conclude the best mobility strategy. We then consider jointly sink mobility and sensor deployment strategy, and propose an energy balance deployment method for periodical data gathering. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and find that the proposed method outperforms uniform distribution better scalability and longer network lifetime.