Performance Evaluation of Mini-sinks Mobility Using Multiple Paths in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a new approach based on the use of many data collectors, which wedesignate Mini-Sinks (MSs), instead of a single sink to collect the data in order to improveWireless Sensor Network (WSN) performance. One or mode MS are mobile and move accordingto a controlled arbitrary mobility inside the sensor field in order to maintain a fully-connectednetwork topology, collecting data within their coverage areas and forwarding it towards the singlemain sink. Energy Conserving Routing Protocol (ECRP), based on route diversity, is implementedin MSs and sensors in order to optimize the transmission cost of the forwarding scheme. A set ofmultiple routing paths between MSs and sensors is generated to distribute the global traffic overthe entire network. Simulations were performed in order to validate the performance of our newapproach. We compare the results obtained with those for a single static sink and mobile sink,and show that our approach can achieve better performances such as packet delivery ratio,throughput, end-to-end delay, network lifetime, residual energy, energy and routing diversityoverhead.