Hyeon-Ju Yoon, Lee-Sub Lee
In a wireless sensor network which consists of a base station as a data sink and a number of sensor nodes, the clustering has been adopted as a way of reducing the energy consumption of communication. The clustering, however, has suffered from the rapid burnout of cluster heads. We propose a 2-tier data collection architecture which requires single-hop intra-cluster transmission and direct communication between mobile sink and cluster heads. To maximize the network lifetime, cluster heads are reselected based on the remaining energy level. The clustering and the routing algorithm are processed by the base station and a mobile node navigates among sensor nodes periodically, collects power usage data from each sensor node, and deliver the next clustering and routing information. A clustering and mobile sink navigation path search algorithm based on Voronoi graphs is proposed.