A Clue Based Data Collection Routing Protocol for Mobile Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent years, mobile sinks are used more and more efficiently in sensor networks to collect data for the mobility advantage in balancing energy consumption than static sinks. However, it is still a challenge in both efficiency and network cost to avoid generating large amounts of overheads and lots of unnecessary energy consumption, when data source forward sensing data to mobile sink proactively according to their location information broadcasted all over the network. To reduce the overhead and balance the energy consumption in a network, we propose a clue-based data collection routing (CBDCR) protocol for mobile sensor networks. In CBDCR, a mobile sink moves randomly other than the following predesigned trajectories, during which it only broadcasts its location messages by limited hops instead of the whole network. The nodes getting these messages are called watchers who can obtain the upstream or downstream relations and infer the hop(s) from them to the mobile sink, and then a watcher stores this information as a “clue” to the location of mobile sink for data forwarding. As the movement of the mobile sink, more and more nodes are becoming watchers, and so a sensing data can be efficiently forwarded to the mobile sink according to these clues. Numerous simulations are conducted with mobile sinks in network to evaluate the performance of CBDCR, which demonstrate that CBDCR can both reduce the redundant transmission messages significantly and balance the network energy consumption.