An efficient solution offering sink mobility support in wireless sensor networks

The wireless sensor networks (WSNs) application scope has widened in recent years. For instance, the IEEE 802.15.4 technology allows establishing a mesh sensor network to support applications that increase the security of physical spaces, such as intruder detection, gas detection, and fire detection. In this paper, we focus on applications which require the support for mobility, including intruder detection and pursuit scenarios. Communications are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard due to its low power consumption, low latency and the ability to connect a large number of sensor nodes in a WSN. We propose the novel Mobile-sink Routing for Large Grids (MRLG) algorithm, which is intended to support sink mobility in a WSN. MRLG allows reducing the routing load by relying on local route recovery processes, which provides significant efficiency in scenarios with a large number of sensors. Experimental results show that, when compared to standard routing strategies based on sink announcements such as the Collection Tree Protocol (CTP), the performance of the MRLG algorithm is significantly boosted in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and routing overhead.