Mobile Sink Data Gathering and Path Determination in WSN based on P-AACO Approach

Although there are numerous problems linked with the sensor networks, the energy-hole problem is one of the serious issues connected to WSN. To overcome this issue, a mobile sink is periodically traversed to fetch data from the sensor nodes deployed in the field by keeping all other nodes in the network as static. Rather than visiting all the nodes, which may result in delay, a mobile sink is permitted to visit only the rendezvous points i.e.; the head node and the rest of the nodes sends data to the nearest head node. The two important challenges in this approach are: finding the exact rendezvous nodes at different locations in the network and also finding the path in which the mobile node needs to be traversed. Optimum rendezvous points not only improve the data aggregation but also maximize the lifetime of the network. This paper suggests a new-fangled optimization approach called the P-AACO, Power-Aware Scheduling and clustering algorithm based on AACO, where an advanced ant colony optimization to determine the optimal mobile sink path for wireless sensor networks. To achieve the desired goals of optimizing network lifetime and minimizing latency, this strategy incorporates an effective mechanism to find the optimal collection of rendezvous points. Reselection of RP is carried out after every stage of transmission to ensure energy utilization and balance the network load. The proposed protocol is compared with LEACH and WRP by taking the performance metrics such as delay, throughput, and energy into consideration. The simulation was carried out using the ns2 simulator and the from the results obtained, it is evident that the merits of P-AACO are manifold and it outperforms the traditional protocols.