Multipath Management Scheme for Supporting Sink Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sink mobility support is one of the essential functionality in many applications. With continuous advancement, the future applications will require not only sink mobility but also high performance. Multipath routing is one of the promising technologies for improving network performance. However, existing multipath routing protocols have not dealt with the sink mobility. As a result, they lead to bad performance in terms of energy efficiency due to the end-to-end path reconstruction. Consequently, a novel path management scheme is required thereby supporting sink mobility without performance degradation. In this paper we propose a multipath management scheme for supporting sink mobility. The proposed scheme dynamically constructs multipath along the moving path of a sink. In addition, the proposed scheme provides the path shortening mechanism according to the sink's movement for reducing energy consumption. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme is superior to existing path management schemes in terms of reliability and energy efficiency.