DLING: A Distributed Mobile Sink Guiding Scheme for Sensor Networks

Abstract—The energy consumption rates of nodes vary in different positions in sensor networks, leading to the early depletion of the nodes and the disconnection of a network. In this paper, we present a distributed mobile sink guiding scheme (DLING) based on the center of gravity theory in physics. DLING regards the sensor network as an object composed of particles. Sensor nodes act as particles and their residual energy is treated as their ”weight”. We use the traditional discovering method for the center of gravity to compute the ”energy center ” of a network. The nodes near the energy center have more residual energy and can afford more traffic load. Then we propose a novel scheme to guide the sink sojourning around the network’s center of energy so that the energy consumption of the nodes will be balanced. The simulation results demonstrate that DLING can achieve further improvements on the network lifetime in comparison with previous moving schemes while having low control costs. Index Terms—wireless sensor network, mobile sink, lifetime elongation, distributed algorithm I