This article proposes a scheme for selecting the best site for sink placement in WSN applications employing backbone assisted communications. By placing the sink at a specific position, energy scavenging and delay constraints can effectively be controlled. In contrast to the conventional scheme for base station placement at the geographical centre or random placement at the end of the region of interest, the proposed scheme places the base station at either the graph theoretical centre or centroid of the backbone connecting nodes in the region of interest. This strategy shows a considerable reduction in the total number of hops that each packet needs to travel to reach the sink. The proposed scheme is applied on all the families of graphs prevalent in backbone assisted sensor networks to confirm the performance consistency and improvement in network parameters of the communication backbone measured in terms of delay, the carried load and the total energy consumption, eventually affected by the average number of hops for the message to reach the sink.
2016 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).