Improved Energy Efficient Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

Remote isolated applications such as agricultural monitoring, corrosion monitoring, condition monitoring etc., needs static infrastructure to be deployed and is spread across a large geographical area to transfer the data from source to gateway. These scenarios consume more power of battery powered devices and need huge infrastructure and maintenance cost. Use of mobile sinks is one good solution for such application to reduce power consumption, infrastructure and maintenance costs. However, the mobile sinks based architectures presented in the literature are not energy efficient and possess with more packet loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a network architecture that uses an embedded database in selected cluster head nodes and mobile sink along with preconfigured route for the mobile sink. This improves network lifetime, packet reception rate and reduces power consumption of mobile sink. The proposed architecture is practically implemented and verified with IITH mote.