Autonomous Movement of Mobile Relays in Wireless Sensor Network to Enhance Network Lifetime

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of intelligent sensors that communicate and coordinate in an energy constrained environment. Due to the limited energy supply of the sensors, lifetime problems arise in static WSN. One of the potential solutions to this problem is a mobility-assisted WSN. Mobility can be introduced by adding extra entities like mobile sinks, mobile cluster-head or mobile relays (MRs) to the existing static WSN. The entities can significantly improve the functionality and performance of the WSN by making it flexible to failures, ease data collection, increase energy efficiency, enhance connectivity, improve coverage and prolong network lifetime. The need of today's applications demands mobility-assisted WSN instead of the traditional static WSN. In this paper, we control the movement of MRs to maximize network lifetime. A distributed algorithm for controlling the movement of MRs is given and its performance is validated for the network parameters such as network lifetime and average residual energy. The proposed method shows that lifetime can be improved compared to that of a static network.