The Evolution of Sink Mobility Management in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Sink mobility has long been recognized as an efficient method of improving system performance in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), e.g. relieving traffic burden from a specific set of nodes. Though tremendous research efforts have been devoted to this topic during the last decades, yet little attention has been paid for the research summarization and guidance. This paper aims to fill in the blank and presents an up-to-date survey on the sink mobility issue. Its main contribution is to review mobility management schemes from an evolutionary point of view. The related schemes have been divided into four categories: uncontrollable mobility (UMM), path-restricted mobility (PRM), location-restricted mobility (LRM) and unrestricted mobility (URM). Several representative solutions are described following the proposed taxonomy. To help readers comprehend the development flow within the category, the relationship among different solutions is outlined, with detailed descriptions as well as in-depth analysis. In this way, besides some potential extensions based on current research, we are able to identify several open issues that receive little attention or remain unexplored so far.