A virtual infrastructure based on honeycomb tessellation for data dissemination in multi-sink mobile wireless sensor networks

A new category of intelligent sensor network applications emerges where motion is a fundamental characteristic of the system under consideration. In such applications, sensors are attached to vehicles, or people that move around large geographic areas. For instance, in mission critical applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sinks can be associated to first responders. In such scenarios, reliable data dissemination of events is very important, as well as the efficiency in handling the mobility of both sinks and event sources. For this kind of applications, reliability means real-time data delivery with a high data delivery ratio. In this article, we propose a virtual infrastructure and a data dissemination protocol exploiting this infrastructure, which considers dynamic conditions of multiple sinks and sources. The architecture consists of 'highways' in a honeycomb tessellation, which are the three main diagonals of the honeycomb where the data flow is directed and event data is cached. The highways act as rendezvous regions of the events and queries. Our protocol, namely hexagonal cell-based data dissemination (HexDD), is fault-tolerant, meaning it can bypass routing holes created by imperfect conditions of wireless communication in the network. We analytically evaluate the communication cost and hot region traffic cost of HexDD and compare it with other approaches. Additionally, with extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of HexDD in terms of data delivery ratio, latency, and energy consumption. We also analyze the hot spot zones of HexDD and other virtual infrastructure based protocols. To overcome the hot region problem in HexDD, we propose to resize the hot regions and evaluate the performance of this method. Simulation results show that our study significantly reduces overall energy consumption while maintaining comparably high data delivery ratio and low latency.