A Case Study for Evaluating IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Network Formation with Mobile Sinks

Wireless Sensor Networks are traditionally composed of a multiplicity of sensor nodes that sense given phenomena and deliver the sensed data to specific sink nodes. In the most of the application scenarios, sensor nodes have been considered motionless. On the contrary, interesting possibilities arise if some sensors are embedded in devices carried by mobile agents as people, cars, animals, etc. If sinks move within the considered sensor field, they are able to provide both sparse sensing and collecting of data measured by static sensors placed at fixed locations. The main goal of this work is to evaluate, through simulations, the impact of sinks' mobility in a wireless sensor network created by using the topology formation mechanism provided by the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard. To this aim, as a practical case study, we consider a wireless sensor network deployed in a museum used to monitor the presence, the localization and other parameters of artworks exposed in it. In this context, we analyze how sinks' mobility affects connectivity and energy consumption for network formation and re-configuration.