An Energy-Efficient Distributed Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

Mobile sink(s) can solve the hotspot issue in static wireless sensor networks (WSNs) but also cause frequent change of network topology, increase the network overhead, and thus affect the network performance. A lot of work has been done to enable efficient routing in such networks. However, little work has addressed the issue of energy efficient distributed routing in WSNs with mobile sinks (mWSNs). This paper designs an energy-efficient distributed routing protocol, which combines energy-efficient data-driven packet forwarding, trail based forwarding, and energy-efficient random walk routing, in order to achieve prolonged network lifetime performance. Detailed protocol design is presented. Simulation results show that our designed protocol can prolong the network lifetime remarkably while maintaining high packet delivery ratio performance with low protocol overhead.