Sink-independent model in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks generally have three kinds of objects: sensor nodes, sinks, and users that send queries and receive data via the sinks. In addition, the user and the sinks are mostly connected to each other by infrastructure networks. The users, however, should receive the data from the sinks through multi-hop communications between disseminating sensor nodes if such users move into the sensor networks without infrastructure networks. To support mobile users, previous work has studied various user mobility models. Nevertheless, such approaches are not compatible with the existing routing algorithms, and it is difficult for the mobile users to gather data efficiently from sensor nodes due to their mobility. To improve the shortcomings, we propose a view of mobility for wireless sensor networks and propose a model to support a user mobility that is independent of sinks.