ECMSH: An Energy-efficient and Cost-effective data harvesting protocol for Mobile Sink-based Heterogeneous WSNs using PSO-TVAC

Efficient energy consumption is crucial in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Uncontrolled energy usage can lead to the hotspot issue, hindering network lifetime and successful packet delivery. Sink mobility has been suggested as a solution, but it comes with challenges such as high data gathering delay and poor packet reception. These problems stem from the short contact time of nodes with the Mobile Sink (MS). To tackle these issues, we present an MS-based heterogeneous WSN with super and normal nodes. Most previous studies only considered the energy heterogeneity of sensors. These methods also suffered from different issues such as fixed MS tours, including inappropriate criteria in cluster construction, proposing greedy schemes, and employing basic metaheuristic algorithms. In our proposed model, super nodes are richer in initial energy and transmission range than normal sensors. In each round, the nodes are organized into clusters, and the MS visits the Cluster Heads (CHs) to gather data packets. Super nodes, owing to their elevated initial energy, are more adept at executing energy-sensitive tasks compared to normal sensors. Additionally, as CH, super nodes extend the contact time with the MS due to their longer transmission range, delivering more packets. The clusters are constructed using a variant of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), namely PSO-TVAC. We empower this method with effective initialization and decoding methods. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic intra-cluster multi-hop routing algorithm to enhance network lifetime. Our other contribution is to propose an efficient algorithm to determine the time to reconfigure the network, while the other algorithms mainly reconfigure the WSN periodically. Simulation results demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, showcasing lower energy consumption, higher energy efficiency, higher lifetime, reduced packet delivery delay, and higher number of received packets by 30%, 38.2%, four times, 20.6%, and 22.6%, respectively.