Distributed dynamic shared tree for minimum energy data aggregation of multiple mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Sink mobility creates new challenges for several sensor network applications. In mobile sink environments, each sink must propagate its current location continuously, through a sensor field, in order to keep all sensor nodes updated with the direction of data forwarding. This method consumes large amounts of energy. Although several protocols, such as DD, TTDD, and SEAD, have been proposed, in order to solve mobile sink problems, no existing approaches provide both a low delay and energy-efficient solution to this mobile sink problem. In this paper, a distributed dynamic shared tree for minimum energy data aggregation with low delay in highly mobile sink environments, is proposed. In the proposed protocol, the tree is shared with the other slave sinks. Through simulations it is shown that the DST is an extremely energy-efficient, robust protocol with relatively low delay, when compared to DD, TTDD, and SEAD.