AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR MOBILE SINKS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS BY USING THE RADIO RANGE

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of small-sized sensor nodes; due to ease of deployment, reliability, scalability, exibility, and self-organization, the existing and potential applications of the wireless sensor networks span a wide spectrum in various domains of the environmental and technical requirements such as vehicle tracking, danger alert and battleeld surveillance. In addition, owing to the growing demand for low cost and `networkable'sensorsinconjunctionwithrecentdevelopments of micro-electro mechanical system (MEMS) and radio frequency (RF) technology, new sensors come with advanced functionalities for processing and communication. One of the known features in the wireless sensor nodes is the limited battery supply. On the other hand, replacing the battery in wireless sensor networks is difcult and often is impossible. Therefore, it is essential to employ an energy-ecient routing protocol for minimizing energy consumption in these networks. In addition, one of the most challenging factors in the energy consumption of wireless sensor networks, is the mobility of the sink node. When the sink moves, its location is changed frequently. Obviously, frequent location updates can lead to excessive power consumption of sensors that exhausts existing energy in the network. In considerable quantity of research has addressed the possible mobility of the sink node. This paper considers the energy limitation, mobility of the sink node, geographical distance between the sink node and the sink node's neighbor nodes, and the distance between the sink node's neighbor nodes and a node within the network called agent node. Then, it oers an appropriate objective function to design an intelligent agent-based energy-ecient routing protocol, called IARR protocol based on the radio range. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol is ecient from the energy consumption point of view, and it reduces the average delay and also does not reduce the packet's delivery ratio in the network.