An Intelligent Energy-Efficient Data Routing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Utilizing Mobile Sink

Data collection and energy consumption are critical concerns in Wireless sensor networks (WSNs). To address these issues, both clustering and routing algorithms are utilized. Therefore, this paper proposes an intelligent energy-efficient data routing scheme for WSNs utilizing a mobile sink (MS) to save energy and prolong network lifetime. The proposed scheme operates in two major modes: configure and operational modes. During the configure mode, a novel clustering mechanism is applied once, and a prescheduling cluster head (CH) selection is introduced to ensure uniform energy expenditure among sensor nodes (SNs). The scheduling technique selects successive CHs for each cluster throughout the WSNs’ lifetime rounds, managed at the base station (BS) to minimize SN energy consumption. In the operational mode, two main objectives are achieved: sensing and gathering data by each CH with minimal message overhead, and establishing an optimal path for the MS using the genetic algorithm. Finally, the MS uploads the gathered data to the BS. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of stability period, network lifetime, average energy consumption, data transmission latency, message overhead, and throughput. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the most recent state-of-the-art methods significantly. The results are substantiated through statistical validation via hypothesis testing utilizing ANOVA, as well as post hoc analysis.