Pipe-Based Energy Efficient Data Dissemination Scheme for Mobile Sink Groups on WSNs

For WSNs, many data dissemination protocols have been proposed for mobile sink groups, in which sinks are spatially apart each other in their close proximity and move together according to group mobility. Most previous works cannot be directly applied to mobile sink groups due to the control overhead caused by the individual mobility in the group. M-geocasting protocol considers both of data dissemination and group mobility, but regional flooding leads to energy inefficiency. Energy consumption is increased in proportion to the spatial size of the group. In addition, the more frequent events generated in a source have more potential of broadcast storms and failures in data reception in some sinks exist in the group. In the paper, we propose an energy efficient scheme for data dissemination called Pipe Based Data Dissemination (PBDD), in which flooding combines with a virtual pipe, preventing the problems in flooding and data loss in group mobility. The virtual pipe is a unit of data storage for stable data dissemination, while flooding is utilized only for location discovery. Simulation results show that the PBDD outperform the existing protocols in terms of energy consumption and successful delivery rate.