Energy-efficient mobile agent communications for maximizing lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), mobile agent (MA) can effectively gather and aggregate the sensed data so as to minimize the network energy consumption. In some realistic applications, the aggregation cost cannot be neglected and MA may get heavier from the data it accumulated as it migrates through the touring, which easily leads to the high communication and aggregation cost in some nodes. In this paper, we first propose a data-gathering algorithm which is optimized by discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) based on MA. In the itinerary of the MA, we introduce adaptive data aggregation scheme and data separation scheme to reduce the energy expenditure. In addition, we further study how to adaptively adjust route structure by considering the remaining energy of the nodes to avoid the nodes’ premature death for extending the network lifetime. Simulation results show that our algorithm has effectively lower energy consumption, higher robust structure, and longer lifetime.