REDM: Robust and Energy Efficient Dynamic Routing for a Mobile Sink in a Multi Hop Sensor Network

An energy efficient multi hop sensor network cannot avoid the energy hole problem, which is the rapid decrease in the energy of nodes around the sink. Also as a sensor network has a limited node resources and unexpected changes of external environment, its nodes should show energy efficiency, reliable data transmission, and topological adaptation to the change of external environment. This study proposes Robust and Energy efficient Dynamic routing for a Mobile sink (REDM), a routing mechanism that satisfies the above-mentioned conditions at the same time using a dynamic single path and sink mobility in a multi hop sensor network. And we also suggest power aware heuristic (PAH) algorithm in which the sink determines its move by itself in consideration of the energy of nodes within a specific number of hops from the sink. According to the result of simulation, compared to the algorithms with other multi hop routing, REDM proposed in this study extended network lifetime by improving the energy efficiency of the nodes while maintaining the same reliability, and REDM based on the PAH algorithm showed a longer network lifetime than stationary REDM and random REDM.