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Abstract
Efficient energy consumption is crucial for energy constrained networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Using a mobile sink to collect the data of the nodes is a good method to balance the energy level of the nodes and prolong the lifetime of the whole network. For the mobile sink, an efficient path planning can make the mobile sink visit significantly more nodes during a limited period and shorten the latency of information gathering. Considering the communication range of the nodes, we can deduce this routing problem as a special case of traveling salesman problem with neighborhoods (TSPN), which is a NP-hard problem [ 1 ]. In this paper, we propose a novel routing design algorithm based on Variable Dimension Particle Swarm Optimization (VD-PSO). In this algorithm, every feasible path solution of TSPN is expressed as a particle. Each dimension of the particle is the coordinates of a rendezvous point (RP, the point where the mobile sink stays to gather data). The dimensionality of the particle is equal to the number of the rendezvous points in the path. Using the evolutionary method of the particles, we can derive the optimal path of the mobile sink. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has fast convergence speed, and the result is quite approximate to the optimal solution.