Data-centric Dissemination to Mobile Sink Group in Wireless Sensor Networks

In WSNs, there have been studies on mobile sink group such as groups of soldiers on battlefields who move together as a single entity. The sinks in the group move randomly within a geographically-restricted region. Although the existing data dissemination protocols can support for mobile sink groups, these protocols suffer from high energy consumption since they only count on flooding scheme. Furthermore, the protocol cannot be scaled effectively because they do not consider multiple sources in which most sensors around the mobile sink group should be considered as sources. When data from multiple sources are sent to the mobile sink group, the sinks cannot differentiate received data according to the source. Thus, this paper proposes grid-based virtual pipes for efficient data dissemination that considers multiple sources. The pipe is localized in a grid within a group region as a rendezvous area for each source. Thus, a source sends data to the assigned virtual pipe, and member sinks retrieve data from the pipe while roaming in the group region. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing protocols in terms of energy consumption and the data delivery ratio.