Mobile Entities in Wireless Sensor Networks: Theory and Performance Analysis

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of intelligent sensors that can communicate to form a self-organizing network and can function without human intervention for a long amount of time. Traditionally, WSN was static, but due to the necessity of today’s applications, there has been a paradigm shift from a static WSN to dynamic WSN. This dynamism can be realized by adding mobility to static WSN. Mobility can be added by introducing extra elements called Mobile Entities (MEs) like Mobile Sinks (MSs), Mobile Cluster Heads (MCHs), Mobile Relays (MRs) and Mobile Sensor Nodes (MSNs). Adding MEs to WSN has attracted much research interests because it can significantly improve the capability and functionality of the WSN by making it flexible to failures, ease data collection, increase energy efficiency, enhance connectivity, improve coverage and prolong network lifetime, so the full potential of MEs can be harnessed to yield maximum benefits in static WSN. The goal of this paper is to present a comparative study and performance analysis of few of the possible MEs in literature and based on the results and analysis the best ME can be chosen for the desired application.