The Impact of the Mobile Element on Performance Improvement in Wireless Sensor Network

Most of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) routing solutions use mainly static sinks to collect data from the entire network. This collection approach results in high traffic load in the sink's vicinity because neighborhood nodes of the sink will be more requested than others nodes in the network. Therefore, these nodes will consume more energy and face high congestion in a large scale WSN. To mitigate this problem, two approaches of mobile networks, according to the type of the mobile element, are today considered as a possible solution to minimize the energy consumption: mobile Sink and mobile relay nodes [1].Our aim in this paper is to studythe impact of the mobile element (Sink and relay nodes) on WSN performancesin terms of energy efficiency, number of received messages as well as latency by using a simulation approach.The obtained results have revealed that the collection approach based on relay nodes give better performance than those based on mobile Sink.