A multicast-query-based data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks with multiple mobile sinks

In wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks, it is a challenge to design reasonable data dissemination protocols to realize reliable, real-time and efficient data transmission from multiple sources to multiple sinks. Recently, many protocols such as TTDD, GHT and LBDD are proposed to solve this problem. However, most of them depend on the whole network topology information to optimize the data dissemination structure or involve a lot of sensor nodes in the structure construction and maintenance, which puts a big burden on the wireless sensor network. In order to meet the demand of energy efficiency and scalability, we present a Multicast-Query-based Data Dissemination protocol (MQDD). MQDD utilizes multicast for event queries and unicast for data transmission with either beacon-based or beacon-less geographic routing algorithms. To further reduce energy consumption in delivering event data to multiple sinks, geographic multicast routing is also integrated in MQDD. Simulation results indicate that MQDD outperforms TTDD in packets delivery ratio, average delay and total energy consumption with varying number of sources and sinks.