Routing and Data Aggregation Toward a High Speed Sink in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work, we study the impact of data aggregation in WSNs with mobile sink nodes that can move at higher speeds. In these cases, propagated queries cannot be answered by using the sink's position when the query was sent, since the sink node will probably be elsewhere. Therefore, conventional data aggregation schemes may not be appropriate due to this high speed. Thus, we propose and evaluate the performance of three new algorithms for data routing and aggregation in WSNs when the sink is moving at a high speed. These algorithms explore the sink movement to create a routing graph composed of the union paths that intersect the sink's trajectory. At each hop, the sink speed and current network delays are used as metric to guide in-network data aggregation. Our results clearly show significant energy savings and efficient data delivery achieved by the proposed algorithms in different scenarios.