Rendezvous point based energy efficient data collection method for Wireless Sensor Network

Mobile sink can be used to reduce the energy consumption of nodes and to increase their lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In applications with tight delay requirements data should be collected with minimum delay together with minimum energy expenditure. As a solution for this challenge the concept of rendezvous points (RPs) can be used and the mobile sink will only visit the RPs for data collection. A method called cluster based rendezvous planning is used here to find the best RPs. Each sensor node is assigned with a weight that depends on its hop distance from the sink and the number of its neighbors. Highest weighted nodes will be selected as RPs. Nodes will send their data to cluster heads and they will forward it to the nearest RPs. An NS2 simulation demonstrates that cluster based rendezvous planning reduces energy consumption, increases network throughput and packet delivery ratio as compared with the existing algorithm.