Fault-tolerant mobile sink in networked sensor systems

A networked sensor system (NSS) is typically comprised of tiny sensors with limited energy and storage capabilities deployed in an environment for monitoring and tracking purposes. Critical to the success of NSS is the reliable collection and dissemination of data while conserving sensors' limited resources, in particular energy. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that aims to move the sink functionality (data aggregation and forwarding) closer to occurring events (areas of high traffic with higher rate of reporting) to reduce the probability of packet drop and the amount of energy expended in multi-hop communications. The scheme provides fault-tolerant data collection and dissemination through data checkpointing and recovery. Our simulation results show that our scheme is highly resilient to sensor and sink failure.