Data dissemination of emergency messages in mobile multi-sink wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), data dissemination is generally performed from sensor nodes to a static sink. If the data under consideration is an emergency message such as a fire alarm, it must be transmitted as fast and reliably as possible towards the sink of WSN. In such mission critical applications, it may not be enough to have one static sink but there will be multiple and mobile sinks. Sinks can be associated to first responders such as firefighters, but also to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The existing approaches have a high communication cost and a high delivery latency, which makes them less suitable for emergency situations. As an alternative to existing protocols, we present Honeycomb Architecture and Hexagonal Tiling-Based Data Dissemination (HexDD) protocol for emergency message transmission in mobile multi-sink WSNs. Simulation results show that HexDD has a high data delivery ratio and a very low data delivery latency, which are major requirements for disaster management scenarios.