Group Mobility Support Protocol for Mobile Sinks Based on Grid Clusters in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, many studies on data dissemination to individual mobile sinks traditionally rely on a strategy that consists of a virtual infrastructure to serve current location of the mobile sinks and a per-sink foot-print chaining mechanism to support local mobility after location update. To adapt the strategy for supporting mobile sink groups, it may be simply considered to exploit a representative per a mobile sink group in order to representatively register location of the mobile sink group and representatively make a foot-print chain of the sink group. However, the representative manner may lead to considerable problems with respect to efficiency and robustness of data dissemination: inefficient data collection problem, needless location update problem, and relay path loss problem. These problems could be caused from dependency between the group and the representative, i.e. a member sink. Therefore, we propose a novel protocol for data dissemination decoupled with any member sink of a mobile sink group. In order to independently deal with a mobile sink group, the protocol is composed of three major mechanisms: 1) representative location update, 2) distributed data collection, and 3) per-group foot-print chaining.