Ferry–Based Directional Forwarding Mechanism for Improved Network Life-Time in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Considerable energy saving can be achieved with mobility-based wireless sensor networks (WSN's), where a mobile node (ferry) visits sensing nodes in a network to collect sensed data. However, the critical issues of such WSN's are limited networks lifetime and high data latency, these critical issues are due to the slow mobility and relatively long route distance for ferries to collect and forward data to the sink. Incorporating ferries in WSNs eliminates the need for multi-hop forwarding of data, and as a result, reduce energy consumption at sensing nodes. In this paper, we introduce the One Hop Cluster-Head Algorithm (OHCH), where a subset of ferries serve as cluster heads (CH), travel between nodes with short distance mobility, collect data originated from sources, and transfer it to the sink with minimum hop count possible, this approach can achieve more balance between network energy saving and data collection delay, also, it is an efficient design to combine between ferries and noise.