Energy efficient data dissemination protocol for a mobile sink group in WSNs

In wireless sensor networks, there have recently been studies on mobile sinks groups such as groups of soldiers on battlefields, which are characterized by geographically collective movement. Although the existing protocols for individual mobile sinks can support the mobile sinks groups, they suffer from high congestion and control overhead due to location updates by each sink in the groups. To solve the location update problem by individual sinks, a protocol, called M-Geocasting only updates the region information of the mobile sink groups to sources. However, since M-Geocasting uses the flooding within the group regions for data delivery to member sinks, it excessively consumes the energy of sensor nodes in the group region. Moreover, the flooding potentially causes broadcast storms within the group region when many events exist. Thus, in this paper, we propose an efficient data dissemination protocol which can avoid the flooding within the group region for supporting mobile sink group. The proposed protocol introduces a virtual pipe in the group region for data dissemination as data storage. In the proposed protocol, a source sends data to the pipe and member sinks retrieve data directly from the pipe. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is superior to the existing protocols in terms of the energy consumption and the data delivery ratio.