Improvisation of Network Lifetime Using Clustering Algorithms and a Mobile Sink in Wireless Sensor Networks

The hot spot problem, also known as the energy hole problem, happens to be a significant concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The nodes near the sink of the network lose their energy rapidly due to multi-hop communication, resulting in a reduction of network lifetime. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we propose two algorithms, one of which provides an efficient path for a mobile sink (MS), contingent on rendezvous points (RPs) and the other, which provides a solution for the same problem, but includes an extra parameter, the delay limit. The initial RPs in both the algorithms are selected using the K-means clustering algorithm and a weight function is applied to make the algorithms more efficient. These algorithms are compared based on several performance metrics with already existing techniques to prove their effectiveness.