An Efficient Data-Driven Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

In this paper, we propose a data-driven routing protocol (called DDRP) for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks (mWSNs). The design objective of DDRP is to effectively reduce the protocol overhead for data gathering in such networks. DDRP exploits the broadcast feature of wireless transmissions for sensor nodes for (gratuitous) route learning. To achieve this goal, each data packet carries an additional option recording the known distance from the sender of the packet to the destined mobile sink. The overhearing of such a data packet will gratuitously provide listeners a route to mobile sink. This is the so-called data-driven nature of DDRP. Continuous such route-learning among neighboring nodes will provide route information for more and more sensor nodes in the network. We present the detailed design of the DDRP protocol. Simulation results show that DDRP has much lower protocol overhead as compared with existing work while ensuring high packet delivery ratio.