Sink Mobility Support Scheme for Continuous Object Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, one of the most important application is tracking diffusive and large-scale phenomena, called continuous object. A number of sources from the large size of a continuous object bring huge communication overhead that former studies have to deal with. Meanwhile, recent application scenarios, such as forest fire suppression by firefighters, require sink mobility support. Most sink mobility support schemes have proposed for individual object tracking. They provide one-to-one connection between a mobile sink and a source. That is, too many connections resulting excess energy consumption are built if continuous object tracking directly adopts them. In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem with building a one-to-many connection between a sink and sources detecting a continuous object. The proposed scheme gradually extends the initial connection between a sink and the first source according to the spread of the continuous object. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme is superior to existing schemes in terms of energy consumption.