A twofold sink-based data collection in wireless sensor network for sustainable cities

Abstract The recent advancement in wireless MCUs, MEMS and integrated internet of things has made it possible to develop the challenging applications such as monitoring of chemical gas, forest fire, and floods (continuous objects). The continuous object tracking in WSNs, is a challenging task due to characteristic nature of continuous objects. They can appear randomly, move continuously, and can change in size and shape. Monitoring such objects require tremendous amount of messaging between sensor nodes to synergistically estimate object’s movement and track its location. In this paper, we propose a twofold-sink mechanism, comprising of a mobile and a static sink node. Both sink nodes gather information about boundary sensor nodes, which is then used to uniformly distribute energy consumption across all network nodes, thus helping in saving residual energy of network nodes. We develop a mechanism, transformed from K-means algorithm, to find the best sensing location of the mobile sink node. It helps to reduce transmission load on the intermediate network nodes situated between the static sink node and the ordinary network sensing nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can distinctly improve lifetime of the network, compared to the one-sink protocol employed in continuous object tracking.