Performance Evaluation of the Impact of Mobile Base Station on Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Base station mobility can be exploited to minimise the energy consumption in a wireless sensor network. This paper investigates the impact that base station movement has upon the performance of cluster-based wireless sensor networks. Three types of base station movement are considered: movement influenced by the position of cluster-heads, random movement and movement partially influenced by the position of cluster- heads. In spite of the overhead associated with finding the base station, the wireless sensor network was shown to gather at least 15% more data packets per Joule of energy with a mobile base station compared to a static base station.