Joint mobility and routing for lifetime elongation in wireless sensor networks

Although many energy efficient/conserving routing protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks, the concentration of data traffic towards a small number of base stations remains a major threat to the network lifetime. The main reason is that the sensor nodes located near a base station have to relay data for a large part of the network and thus deplete their batteries very quickly. The solution we propose in this paper suggests that the base station be mobile; in this way, the nodes located close to it change over time. Data collection protocols can then be optimized by taking both base station mobility and multi-hop routing into account. We first study the former, and conclude that the best…