An Energy-Efficient and Low-Latency Sink Positioning Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

This paper investigates the sink positioning problem in Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) with the consideration of the energy-latency trade-offs. Energy-efficiency and low-latency are two major objectives in most researches on WSNs. Positioning the sink properly and exploiting its mobility can improve the two performances. A novel linear programming model is proposed to solve the sink positioning problem. Its objective function represents the overall performance of the network lifespan and the average packet latency. We can get not only the position pattern of the sink but also the sojourn time ratio for each possible position according to the optimization results. Simulations are accomplished on NS-2. The results show that compared with a static sink approach or a positioning approach which only concerns the energy-efficiency, our approach can greatly shorten the average packet latency and prolong the network lifespan, especially when the sensor nodes are distributed asymmetrically or the traffic load is unbalanced.