Energy-efficient data dissemination algorithm based on virtual hexagonal cell-based infrastructure and multi-mobile sink for wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network, reducing the energy consumption of sensor nodes and increasing energy conservation can be considered as two significant factors to prolong the network longevity. In this scheme, we proposed an energy-efferent data dissemination algorithm for the sensor nodes by making a virtual hexagonal cell-based infrastructure and multi-mobile sink to create a balance in energy consumption and to mitigate the energy-hole problem. The basic idea of the algorithm is to provide the ability for some of the sensing nodes that are elected by the virtual hexagonal backbone to inform other sensing nodes about the latest location of the nearest mobile sinks to decrease the overhead of updating the mobile sink location for the sensing nodes. Moreover, the sensor nodes can benefit considerably from these specified nodes as a relay node in the multi-hop routing process to send the data to the closest mobile sink based on the latest sink position information, which in turn leads to high energy conservation and low communication overhead between the sensing nodes and the mobile sinks in the network. According to the simulation results, the performance of the proposed scheme is better than the existing data transmission approaches in terms of total energy consumption, delay, and network longevity.