Simulation study of cluster based data dissemination for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Recent years have witnessed increasing research efforts of incorporating mobility into wireless sensor networks in order to improve energy efficiency and network coverage. In particular, after introducing mobile sinks, at the cost of increased message delivery delay, the performance of network lifetime can be significantly enhanced by limiting the hop count between the communicating sensor-sink pair. In this paper, we propose a cluster based data dissemination (CBDD) scheme, which does not require any localization algorithm. The basic idea of CBDD is to divide the communication between mobile sinks and source sensors into inter-cluster and intra-cluster communication phases, and limit the disruption of the data dissemination path within a cluster. Through extensive simulations, we compare the performance of CBDD against AODV (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) and TTDD (Two-Tier Data Dissemination), which are two popular routing protocols for mobile wireless sensor networks. Simulation results have indicated that CBDD is a good option for data dissemination in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks.