A Fast and Efficient Broadcast Protocol With a Mobile Sink Node in Asynchronous Wireless Sensor Networks

We investigate a broadcast scenario that a mobile sink disseminating broadcast packets while moving in asynchronous wireless sensor networks (WSNs), to prolong the network lifetime and reduce the broadcast delay. Such a scenario may yield multiple logical sink nodes in WSNs and the moving speed and trajectory of the mobile sink have the significant impact on the speed and efficiency of the broadcast. Thus, the conventional broadcast protocols may not fit for the mobile sink scenario. We propose a fast and efficient broadcast (FEB) protocol with a mobile sink in asynchronous WSNs. We analyze the moving pattern as well as the travel speed of the mobile sink. We jointly consider the broadcast process, the node location, and the neighbor coverage information within two-hops and then propose an efficient broadcast scheme together with a heuristic moving strategy for the mobile sink. The proposed broadcast scheme needs to exchange node coverage information before the transmission begins, thus to avoid redundant packet transmissions, and the proposed moving pattern strategy decreases the network broadcast delay by moving the mobile sink to monitoring areas, where fewer nodes are covered by the broadcast process. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol significantly reduces the broadcast delay and energy consumption.