Power-Efficient Communication Algorithms for Wireless
Mobile Sensor Networks
Chuan-Ming Liu and Chuan-Hsiu Lee
Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Info. Eng.
National Taipei Univ. of Tech.
Taipei, Taiwan
{cmliu,s2598004}@ntut.edu.tw
ABSTRACT
One important issue in wireless sensor networks is how to
gather sensed information in an energy efficient way since
the energy is a scarce resource in a sensor node. Many pro-
tocols have been proposed for data-gathering between wire-
less sensor nodes. However, most of these protocols work on
static wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we provide
clustering-based and time-driven protocols which minimize
energy dissipation for data-gathering in wireless mobile sen-
sor networks where the sensor nodes are capable of mobility.
We first consider the node mobility when organizing clusters.
Our protocols will have a sensor node select a proper cluster-
head to join in order to save energy. We then consider how
to elect the cluster-heads and provide two algorithms for
cluster-head election. Last, we implement all the protocols
and perform the experiments for evaluating the protocols.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.2 [Network
Protocols]: Routing protocols
General Terms: Algorithms, Performance.
Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Mobility, Data Gath-
ering, Energy-Efficiency.
1. INTRODUCTION
A wireless sensor network consists of a large number of
tiny, low-power, cheap sensors having sensing, data process-
ing, and wireless communication components. In this paper,
we provide three data-gathering protocols in wireless mobile
sensor networks where the sensor nodes are capable of mov-
ing. Many protocols have been proposed for data gathering
or communication between wireless sensor nodes [2, 3, 6, 7,
8, 10, 13]. To our knowledge, most of these protocols work
on static wireless sensor networks. Nevertheless, in many
applications, the sensor nodes can move either by outside
force or its mobility component.
In order to measure the performance of a data-gathering
protocol, we will measure the lifetime of a system. The life-
time of a system is the duration in which the system works
Copyright is held by the author/owner.
PE-WASUN’04, October 7, 2004, Venezia, Italy.
ACM 1-58113-959-4/04/0010.
121
Li-Chun Wang
Dept. of Comm. Eng.
National Chiao-Tung University
Hsin-Chu, Taiwan
lichun@cc.nctu.edu.tw
and relates to (1) the energy consumption and (2) the qual-
ity of service. An energy efficient data-gathering protocol
can make the system live longer; therefore, improves the
service time.
2. PROBLEMS
Our work is to develop a clustering-based data-gathering
protocol for wireless mobile sensor networks, which consists
of a number of rounds and each round has two major phases:
(1) organizing clusters and (2) message transmission phases.
In the phase of organizing clusters, there are two steps: one
step is to elect the cluster-heads and then the following step
is to form the clusters.
We first introduce a mechanism to form the clusters by
considering the node’s mobility. Then, we provide two dif-
ferent algorithms to elect the cluster-heads. We measure the
energy efficiency by the system lifetime in terms of number
of rounds which a system experiences. We consider the wire-
less mobile sensor networks where:(1) The BS is fixed and
located far away from the sensor nodes, (2) All the sensor
nodes are homogeneous and power limited, (3) Each sensor
node is equipped with a GPS (Global Positioning System)
device, (4) Each sensor node is capable of moving: each
sensor node has a constant speed and fixed direction (Note
that, different sensor nodes may have different speeds and
directions.), (5) All sensor nodes are time-synchronized.
3. CLUSTERING WITH MOBILITY (CM)
Recall that each sensor node can use its location informa-
tion obtained from the attached GPS device to calculate its
speed and direction. In CM (clustering sensor nodes with
mobility) protocol, the sensor node then uses such informa-
tion to estimate the distances from itself to all the cluster-
heads at some given time t; therefore, can have a better
decision on which cluster to join. We further define such a
given time t as the clustering factor Tc which impacts the
organizing of the clusters.
4. CLUSTER-HEAD ELECTION
We provide two distributed algorithms which avoid the
case that there is no cluster-head in a round. The basic idea
of the first algorithm is based on LEACH but simply skips
the round which has no cluster-heads elected. The other
distributed algorithm uses the unique ids of the sensor nodes
and decides the cluster-heads by counting.
 100
System Lifetime(200m x 200m;1J)
Tc Protocol Round (first Number
90
: LEACH dead node) of rounds
: CM
: CM−IR
: CM−C
CM-C 456 899
80
0.7 CM-IR 411 831
CM 310 656
accumulated number of dead nodes

70

60 LEACH 297 604

50
CM-C 460 905
0.72 CM-IR 419 833
CM 313 656
40

30
LEACH 297 604
20 CM-C 454 913
10
0.74 CM-IR 419 841
CM 309 659
0
300 400 500 600
round
700 800 900
LEACH 297 604
CM-C 461 899
0.76 CM-IR 413 833
Figure 1: The system lifetime of the wireless mobile CM 309 657
sensor network which has 100 sensor nodes in the LEACH 297 604
range of 200m× 200m; the speed of each sensor node CM-C 458 916
is 0.5 m/sec; each sensor node has initial energy 1.0J 0.78 CM-IR 420 843
and sends 2000-bit data packet. CM 308 661
LEACH 297 604
CM-C 457 916
5. EXPERIMENTS 0.8 CM-IR 420 856
We implement LEACH and our protocols in C++. The CM 310 658
result shows that, by using our protocols, the whole system LEACH 297 604
can live longer. Generally, all of our protocols make the sys-
tem lifetime longer than LEACH: (1) protocol CM makes
the system lifetime 5%-10% longer than LEACH and (2) Table 1: System lifetimes (in terms of the number
Protocols CM-IR and CM-C perform much better and have of rounds) using different values of clustering factor
40% - 55% longer system lifetime than LEACH. Figure 1 Tc for each protocols.
shows one of the results in our experiments and Table 1 lists
the average system time in terms of the number of rounds
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