Latest studies have exploited sink mobility as a pervasive approach to effectively mitigate the energy hole problem frequently perceived in the clustered wireless sensor network. For mobile sink (MS) based data collection, the selection of MS sojourn location plays a significant role in network performance. Moreover, there are several challenges to WSN in the form of energy preservation and data delivery latency. A one-hop data collection by the MS from each cluster conserves the network energy significantly but increases the number of sojourn points (SPs) which elongates the MS tour time. On the contrary, a lesser number of SPs may indulge the long chain of multi-hop data forwarding, which may further bring the energy hole issue into existence. In order to find a trade-off between energy preservation and data delivery delay, this article aims to attain an optimal number of SPs that guarantee the one-hop data collection from each cluster. Subsequently, an MS traversal path is formed by exploiting the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm that generates a near-optimal solution. Simulation results manifest the efficacy of the proposed protocol over the existing ones in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, etc.

最新研究已将接收器移动性作为一种普遍使用的方法来有效缓解群集无线传感器网络中经常出现的能量漏洞问题。对于基于移动接收器（MS）的数据收集，MS驻留位置的选择在网络性能中起着重要作用。此外，以能量保存和数据传递等待时间的形式，WSN还面临一些挑战。MS从每个群集进行的单跳数据收集可显着节省网络能量，但会增加逗留点（SP）的数量，从而延长了MS的旅行时间。相反，较少数量的SP可能会沉迷于多跳数据转发的长链中，这可能会进一步带来能量漏洞问题。为了在节能和数据传输延迟之间找到平衡点，本文旨在获得最佳数量的SP，以确保从每个群集中进行单跳数据收集。随后，通过利用产生近似最优解的蚁群优化（ACO）算法形成MS遍历路径。仿真结果从网络寿命，能耗，数据包传输率，端到端延迟等方面证明了所提出协议的有效性。