Energy-Aware Data Aggregation for Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks with a Mobile Sink

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made up of many small and highly sensitive nodes that have the ability to react quickly. In WSNs, sink mobility brings new challenges to large-scale sensor networks. Almost all of the energy-aware routing protocols that have been proposed for WSNs aim at optimizing network performance while relaying data to a stationary gateway (sink). However, through such contemporary protocols, mobility of the sink can make established routes unstable and non-optimal. The use of mobile sinks introduces a trade-off between the need for frequent rerouting to ensure optimal network operation and the desire to minimize the overhead of topology management. In this paper, in order to reduce energy consumption and minimize the overhead of rerouting frequency, we propose an energy-aware data aggregation scheme (EADA) for grid-based wireless sensor networks with a mobile sink. In the proposed scheme, each sensor node with location information and limited energy is considered. Our approach utilizes location information and selects a special gateway in each area of a grid responsible for forwarding messages. We restrict the flooding region to decrease the overhead for route decision by utilizing local information. We conducted simulations to show that the proposed routing scheme outperforms the coordination-based data dissemination scheme (CODE) (Xuan, H. L., & Lee, S. Proceedings of the Sensor Networks and Information Processing Conference, pp. 13–18, 2004).