Communication Strategy to Reflect Group Mobility Issue of Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, many studies on data dissemination to individual mobile sinks traditionally rely on a strategy that consists of a virtual infrastructure to serve current location of the mobile sinks and a per-sink foot-print chaining mechanism to support local mobility after location update. To adapt the strategy for supporting mobile sink groups, it might be simply considered to exploit a representative per a mobile sink group in order to representatively register location of the mobile sink group and representatively make the foot-print chain of the sink group. However, the representative manner may lead to considerable problems with respect to efficiency and robustness of data dissemination: inefficient data collection problem, needless location update problem, and relay path loss problem. These problems could be caused from dependency between the group and the representative, i.e. a member sink. Therefore, we propose a novel strategy for data dissemination decoupled with any member sink of a mobile sink group. In order to independently deal with a mobile sink group, the novel strategy is composed of three major mechanisms: 1) representative location update, 2) distributed data collection, and 3) per-group foot-print chaining.