Extending directed diffusion routing algorithm to support sink mobility in wireless sensor networks

Power-aware routing, have been studied to avoid energy-scarce sensors and achieve network lifetime improvement but recently, it was noticed that sink mobility can also be used to improve network lifetime by avoiding excessive transmission overhead at nodes that are close to the location that would be occupied by a static sink. Also in many situations, a static sink may be unfeasible because of deployment or security constraints. In this paper, an energy-efficient method is introduced which can deliver data packets to mobile sink nodes. As can observed from simulation results, the mobile sink directed diffusion (MSDD) offers a magnificent way to upgrade directed diffusion algorithm to support sink mobility with minimum energy overhead and acceptable performance. Furthermore, in the proposed algorithm, no location service or predictable sink trajectory is assumed which is a common requirement in most of mobile sink routing algorithms. Simulation results show that MSDD algorithm can reach the packet delivery rate of over 55% in the worst case with the sink speed of 30 m/s with acceptable energy overhead.