Towards optimal path planning for sustainable data collection in real-time wireless sensor networks

Data collection using mobile sink(s) has proven to reduce energy consumption and enhance the network lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Generally speaking, a mobile sink (MS) traverses the network region, sojourning at rendezvous points (RPs) and gathering data there from nearby sensor nodes (SNs). However, determining the optimal number and location of RPs is a hard problem. Metaheuristic algorithms are well suited to solve such kind of problems. In this paper, we propose a tour planning scheme for the MS by a combined approach that uses K-means clustering and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. The proposed scheme first determines a set of near-optimal RPs and then uses them to schedule the tour of the MS. Herein, the energy consumption of the overall scheme is reduced due to the low computational cost of the proposed algorithm. At last, the proposed scheme is shown to outperform the comparative algorithms through simulation.