Data Dissemination Scheme for Mobile Sink Group Based on Movement Behavior in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor applications such as disaster recovery and military actions, the behavior of mobile sinks is characterized by group features. A number of mobile sinks move together in a group manner, and mobile sinks in the group stay closely and randomly move within a geographically restricted region. Recently, many communication schemes have been suggested to reflect the properties of the mobile sink group to effectively support the group communications. These schemes calculate the group region and disseminate the source's data to the calculated region in a certain discrete-time. However, as they ignore the continuous movement behavior of the group, they might have a serious reach ability problem that some mobile sinks cannot receive the source's data. Also, the periodic calculation of the region and propagation of data extrinsic to the movement of the group cause a waste of network resources. In this paper, we propose a novel data dissemination scheme for mobile sink group considering continuous movement of the group, which could resolve the problems of reach ability and inefficiency faced by the previous schemes. The proposed scheme allows the sink group to receive the source's data from virtual grid infrastructure when the group moves out from a local grid. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is superior to previous ones in terms of transmission success ratio and node energy consumption.