Performance Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks for Mobile Sink Considering Consumed Energy Metric Tao Yang ∗ , Makoto Ikeda ∗ , Gjergji Mino ∗ , Leonard Barolli † , Arjan Durresi ‡ and Fatos Xhafa § ∗ Graduate School of Engineering Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT) 3-30-1 Wajiro-Higashi, Higashi-Ku, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan Email: bd07003@bene.fit.ac.jp, makoto.ikd@acm.org, bd09002@bene.fit.ac.jp † Department of Information and Communication Engineering Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT) 3-30-1 Wajiro-Higashi, Higashi-Ku, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan Email: barolli@fit.ac.jp ‡ Department of Computer and Information Science Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) 723 W. Michigan Street SL 280 Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA durresi@cs.iupui.edu § Technical University of Catalonia Department of Languages and Informatics Systems C/Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain E-mail: fatos@lsi.upc.edu Abstract—Sensor networks are a sensing, computing and communication infrastructure that are able to observe and respond to phenomena in the natural environment and in our physical and cyber infrastructure. The sensors themselves can range from small passive micro-sensors to larger scale, con- trollable weather-sensing platforms. To reduce the consumed energy of a large scale sensor network, we consider a mobile sink node in the observing area. In this work, we investigate how the sensor network performs in the case when the sink node moves. We compare the simulation results for two cases: when the sink node is mobile and stationary considering lattice and random topologies using AODV protocol. The simulation results have shown that for the case of mobile sink, the consumed energy is better than the stationary sink (about half of stationary sink in lattice topology). Also for mobile sink, the consumed energy of lattice topology is better than random topology. Keywords-WSN; Radio Model; Consumed Energy; WSN Topology. I. I NTRODUCTION In the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), a large number of nodes, having both computing power and wireless commu- nication capability, are embedded in the environment, collect sensor data, and report to the sink. WSN, have wide range of applications and can be categorized into monitoring space and monitoring things. WSN can be considered as a special type of Ad Hoc wireless sensor networks, where sensor nodes are, in general, stationary. A unique feature of sensor networks is the cooperative effort of sensor nodes. Sensor nodes are usually fitted with on-board processors. Instead of sending the raw data to the nodes responsible for the fusion, they use their processing abilities to locally carry out simple computations and transmit only the required and partially processed data. A sensor system normally consists of a set of sensor nodes operating on limited energy and a base system without any energy constraint called sink. Typically, the sink serves as the gathering point for the collected data. The sink also broadcasts various control commands to sensor nodes. There are many applications of senor networks. For in- stance, in military application, the rapid deployment, self- organization, and fault-tolerance characteristics of sensor nodes make them a promising, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting systems. In health car, sensor nodes can be used to monitor patients and assist disabled patients. Other applications include managing inventory, monitoring product quality, and monitoring disaster areas. Recently, there are many research work for sensor net- works [1], [2], [3], [4]. In our previous work [5], we imple- mented a simulation system for sensor networks considering different protocols and different propagation radio models. In this paper, we study a particular application of WSN for event-detection and tracking. The application is based on the assumption that WSN present some degree of spatial redundancy. For instance, whenever an event happens, a certain event data is transmitted to the sink node. Because of the spatial redundancy, we can tolerate some packet loss, as long as the required detection or event-reliability holds. This reliability can be formulated as the minimum number 2010 IEEE 24th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops 978-0-7695-4019-1/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/WAINA.2010.50 245