Itinerary planning for mobile sinks in network-coding-based wireless sensor networks

Itinerary plan determines the order of locations that controllable-mobile sink(s) has to sojourn at them, where is a challenging issue especially for the resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Despite of approved advantages for collecting sensed information by the mobile sink(s), itinerary planning may effect on other techniques, hence, it should be designed with considering impressible techniques such as network coding. This paper proposes an optimal itinerary plan for mobile sinks in the network-coding-based WSNs. Although this optimization can not be solved in polynomial time, but the mathematical formulation can help us estimate the problem characteristic and figure out the firmness of it. This optimization leads to less energy consumption and increases the lifetime of network-coding-based WSNs. Since, there exist restricted processing resources in WSNs, the optimal solving of this problem is impractical in large-scale WSNs and so, a genetic algorithm is proposed. Results illustrate that proposed genetic algorithm converges to the optimal solution with an appropriate accuracy in less execution time. Moreover, the simulation results demonstrate that proposed approaches have significantly lower energy consumption and consequently more lifetime in comparison with conventional ones where are not considered network coding.