Data Dissemination Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink Groups

There have been many routing protocols proposed for data dissemination to multiple mobile sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and the protocols regard each sink as an individually distributed single entity without relationship of each other. Recently, mobile group entities have been introduced in WSNs. A number of mobile sinks move together in a group manner, and mobile sinks in the group stay closely, and they randomly move within a geographically restricted region. Although the existing multicasting protocols could be applied in such a group communication application, they suffer from high congestion and control overhead due to location updates to a source by individual mobile sinks. Geocasting protocols are effective means for delivering data packets to a sink group within a restricted region, but do not guarantee successful data delivery to a mobile sink group since they only focus on transmitting data to all nodes within a stationary region. This paper propose Region-Based Data Dissemination (RBDD) scheme to address these problems. RBDD first determines the group region based on current locations of mobile sinks in a group, and advertises the information of the group region to sources. It then directly transmits data to a group of mobile sinks through restricted flooding only within the region. Simulation results show that RBDD guarantees data delivery to a mobile sink group.