Minimum moving dynamic base station positioning in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of many small and low-cost sensors that use wireless communication, and these networks can be adapted to a number of environments. For effective sensing and flawless operation, significant cooperation and interdependence between sensor points are essential, which is why energy efficiency is important in WSNs. The positioning of base stations and the way of communication between nodes both have a considerable impact on energy efficiency and life cycle of the network and, consequently, on the number of packages that will reach the base station. In order to use energy effectively, this study proposes a new dynamic base station positioning algorithm with minimum motion that incorporates the location as well as the remaining energy of the nodes, and the performance of this algorithm has been investigated in detail on clustering algorithms such as K-means and K-medoid as well as the HEED hierarchical protocol with the use of various WSN parameters. The study has been simulated on OMNeT++ simulation program in varying numbers of nodes and different node distributions. An analysis of all the results reveals that, compared to fixed base stations, the use of dynamic base stations, on average, provides 133.34% improvement in the HEED protocol, 116.36% improvement in the K-means algorithm, and 114.23% improvement in the K-medoid algorithm. Compared to the positioning of fixed base stations, the total number of packages reaching the base station has been found to improve, on average, 251.72% in the HEED protocol, 225.49% in the K-means algorithm, and 220.87% in the K-medoid algorithm.