A distributed and energy-efficient approach for collecting emergency data in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Abstract

Recently, mobile sinks (MSs) have been widely employed to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The main challenge of using MSs is their enormous data collection delay, thereby making them unsuitable for handling emergency data. In this study, we propose a distributed and energy-efficient MS-based data gathering algorithm that collects emergency data with a low delay. The proposed algorithm, namely Energy-efficient Emergency Data collection in WSNs with Mobile Sinks (EEDMS), follows different strategies for collecting emergency and normal data. It constructs a spanning tree to forward emergency data toward the base station. The algorithm uses an MS to collect normal data. For this purpose, it constructs a grid over the field. This grid is shifted periodically to make the energy consumption even throughout the WSN. Combining tree and MS-based data gathering approaches brings about important outcomes, comprising low emergency data collection delay along with low energy consumption. Performance evaluations verify that the results are satisfactory.