Delay-Aware Green Routing for Mobile-Sink-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile sinks were introduced in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to mitigate the infamous hotspot problem. However, routing in mobile-sink-based WSNs requires frequent updation of sink location information to all the sensor nodes; which is an energy-expensive process for resource-constrained WSNs. Therefore, it is required to develop a green routing protocol that can minimize the energy overhead in sink location updation as well as reduce the data delivery delay. This article proposes a virtual-infrastructure-based delay-aware green routing protocol (DGRP) that creates multiple rings in the sensor field and limits the updation of mobile sink location information to the nodes belonging to the rings only. Simulation results show that DGRP outperforms existing routing protocols in terms of energy consumption and throughput. In addition to this, DGRP results in similar to 26%, similar to 39%, and similar to 35% improvement in data delivery delay for a varying number of sensor nodes, sink speeds, and network sizes, respectively, when compared with the state of the art.