Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made of autonomous sensor nodes distributed into a given physical environment to monitor the events and communicate with a base station or sink. Data gathering therefore appears to be a major objective of sensor nodes in WSNs. Mobile sinks (MS) have been widely used for this purpose as they implicitly provide load-balancing and help achieving uniform energy-consumption across the network. Several path discovery schemes for mobile sink have been proposed in the literature. However most of these solutions do not leverage the fact that the process of identification/selection of visit points can be executed as many times as needed, in order to balance the energy consumption at these points, this without much expending network resources. Generally these points are referred as cluster heads and the procedure of establishing such a cluster topology is called clustering. In this paper, is presented an efficient path discovery scheme which not only addresses the above mentioned issue, but also determines target points at which the MS stops in order to ensure reliable communication during data transfer The proposed scheme employs well known protocols from the literature namely the instantaneous clustering algorithm (ICP) for WSN, whose main objective is to minimize the total time consumption of clustering. The circumference visit method is utilized to determine the target points which form the path of the MS. With the performance analysis performed, it’s shown that the proposed method increases network lifetime, by reducing the amount of data transmissions and time consumption of clustering.

Clustering Coverage Data gathering Mobile sink Sensor network.