Data Dissemination via Local Sink in Geographic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Most existing geographic routing protocols on sensor networks concentrates on finding ways to guarantee data forwarding from the source to the destination, and not many protocols have been done on collecting and aggregating data of sources in a local and adjacent region. However, data generated from the sources in the local and adjacent region are often redundant and highly correlated. Accordingly, data collection and aggregation of the region in the sensor networks is important and necessary to save the energy of sensor nodes. We introduce the concept of a local sink to address this issue in geographic routing. The local sink is a sensor node in the region, in which the sensor node is temporarily selected by the global sink for collecting and aggregating data from source nodes in the region and delivering the aggregated data to the global sink, in geographic routing. We also design a model to determine an optimal location of the local sink and propose a mechanism to collect data through the local sink. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism with the local sink is more efficient in terms of the energy and the data delivery ratio than the existing mechanism in a geographic routing.