Abstract

The position of the base station (BS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has a significant impact on network lifetime. This paper suggests a mobile BS positioning algorithm for cluster-based WSNs, which considers both the location and the remaining energy level of the cluster heads in the network and evaluate the performance of the algorithm under different values of network sizes, including 100m x 100m, 200m x 200m and 300m x 300m. Simulations are conducted by using OMNeT++ and proposed method is compared with two different static BS positions, including central and external, on HEED protocol. The results show that mobile BS performs better than both central and external BS positions under all network sizes. Besides, the performance difference between the proposed method and the others increases as the size of the network increases, which demonstrates that the proposed mobile BS positioning also provides scalability.