Intermittent Wireless Multihop Transmission Protocol in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

A sensor network is one of the most expected Internet applications. Here, wireless multihop transmissions of sensor data messages are applied to reach them the nearest stationary sink node connected to the Internet. Recently, various mobile sensors are available due to advances of robotics technologies and communication technologies supporting such dynamic wireless multihop networks are required to be developed. A location based message-by-message routing protocol such as GEDIR is suitable for dynamic wireless networks; however, it is required for each mobile wireless sensor node to achieve the current locations of all its neighbor nodes. On the other hand, various intermittent communication methods for a low power consumption requirement have been proposed for wireless sensor networks. IRDT is one of the most efficient methods; however, it is difficult to combine the location based routing and the intermittent communication. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a probabilistic approach with help of one of the solutions of the secretaries problem. Here, each time a neighbor sensor node wakes up from its sleep mode, an intermediate sensor node determines whether it forwards its buffered sensor data messages to it or not based on an estimation of achieved pseudo speed of the message. Simulation experiments show that the proposed probabilistic method achieves shorter transmission delay than the two naive combinations of IRDT and GEDIR in sensor networks with mobile sensor nodes and a stationary sink node.