Region Based Data Dissemination Scheme for Mobile Sink Groups in Wireless Sensor Networks

In many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the sensing data are disseminated from a source to multiple mobile sinks. Since WSNs consists of a number of sensor nodes with limited capabilities, previous studies mainly discuss on how to send the data efficiently and do not consider the group mobility of mobile sinks that move together staying closely and randomly move within a geographically restricted region. Although the existing multicasting protocols could be applied, they suffer from high congestion and control overhead due to location updates by individual mobile sinks. Geocasting protocols are effective for data delivery to a sink group within a restricted region, but do not guarantee since they only focus on transmitting data to all nodes within a stationary region. Therefore, we propose Region Based Data Dissemination (RBDD) scheme to address these problems. RBDD provides efficient data dissemination scheme for mobile sink groups, so it guarantees data transmission not only when a sink group does move as a whole, but also its member sinks move inside of the region or outside of it. Simulation results show that RBDD guarantees data delivery to a mobile sink group.