An Efficient Path Planning Strategy in Mobile Sink Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are considered the backbone of the Internet of Things (IoT), which enables sensor nodes (SNs) to achieve applications similarly to human intelligence. However, integrating a WSN with the IoT is challenging and causes issues that require careful exploration. Prolonging the lifetime of a network through appropriately utilising energy consumption is among the essential challenges due to the limited resources of SNs. Thus, recent research has examined mobile sinks (MSs), which have been introduced to improve the overall efficiency of WSNs. MSs bear the burden of data collection instead of consuming energy at the routeing by SNs. In a network, some areas generate more data through SNs that contain frequent, urgent messages. These messages carry sensitive data that must be delivered immediately to user applications. Collecting such messages via MSs, especially on a large scale, increases delays, which are not tolerable in some real applications. This issue has not been studied much. Thus, the present study utilises the advantages of the priority parameter to concentrate on these areas and proposes a new model named ‘energy efficient path planning of MS-based area priority’ (EEPP-BAP). This method involves non-urgent and urgent messages. It is comprised of four procedures. Initially, after SNs are distributed randomly in a wide monitoring field, the monitoring field is partitioned into equal zones according to priority, either differently or equally. Next is clustering based on the cluster head (CH) selected to perform the particle swarm optimisation algorithm (PSO). Then, the MS moves first to the zones with higher priority and less distance to perform the brain storm optimisation algorithm. Finally, for urgent messages from the other zones at which the MS continues, the proposed approach establishes a routeing technique using multi-hop communication based on the MS position and using PSO. The proposed solution is aimed at delivering urgent messages to MSs free of latency and with minimal packet loss. The simulation results proved that the EEPP-BAP method can improve network performance compared with other models based on different parameters that have been used to construct the controlled movement of MSs in large-scale environments involving urgent messages. The proposed method increased the average lifetime of SNs to 206.6% on average, reduced the average end-to-end delay to 7.1%, and increased the average packet delivery ratio to 36.9%.