Exploiting Mobility for Efficient Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we introduce a novel mobility model for mobile sinks in which the sinks move towards randomly distributed destinations, where each destination is associated with a mission. The novel mobility model is termed the random mobility with destinations. There have been many studies on mobile sinks; however, they merely support two extreme cases of sink mobility. The first case features the most common and general mobility, with the sinks moving randomly, unpredictably, and inartificially. The other case takes into account mobility only along predefined or determined paths such that the sinks can gather data from sensor nodes with minimum overhead. Unfortunately, these studies for the common mobility and predefined path mobility might not suit for supporting the random mobility with destinations. In order to support random mobility with destination, we propose a new protocol, in which the source nodes send their data to the next movement path of a mobile sink. To implement the proposed protocol, we first present a mechanism for predicting the next movement path of a mobile sink based on its previous movement path. With the information about predicted movement path included in a query packet, we further present a mechanism that source nodes send energy-efficiently their data along the next movement path before arriving of the mobile sink. Last, we present mechanisms for compensating the difference between the predicted movement path and the real movement path and for relaying the delayed data after arriving of the mobile sink on the next movement path, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves better performance than the existing protocols.