Finding the Best Sink Location in WSNs with Reliability Route Analysis

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) became one of the emerged networks that are used in many critical applications. One of the challenges of the network is the energy source of its sensors since sensors depends, in most of the cases, on a double AA batteries and they are supposed to live for long time. One of the important methods to save sensors energy is to reduce the messages ow transferred to the sink node in a multi-hop wireless sensor networks. To do so, this paper investigates the best location to the sink node to maximize the reliability of a message delivery before it is being received and processed by a sink. The paper introduces the optimal location solution through utilizing the Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solution to the problem in small- scale WSNs. Consequently, maximum reliability of a path may lead to the minimum energy consumed for retransmission along the routing path. However, in large-scale networks, the paper introduces the Genetic Algorithm (GA) as one of the heuristics solution. The Fitness function of the GA calculates the negative value of the log of the reliability of a path and the GA tries to nd the sink position with the minimum tness value to minimize the energy spent by each sensor in the routing towards the sink. An extensive set of experiments are introduced and the MILP solution results are compared to GA approach for the GA performance measure. The comparison showed that the GA have found near optimal solution in reasonable time. In addition, GA is utilized in large-scale problems as well