An Efficient Data Reporting Scheme in Large Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

Abstract

Efficient data reporting is an important issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with mobile sinks. However, high sink update cost causes sensor nodes to consume much energy, especially when sinks move rapidly. In this paper, we propose an efficient data reporting scheme in large WSNs with mobile sinks. In our network environment, the sensor field is divided into several grids, and forms a hierarchical sensor network adaptively, according to network sizes. We set location servers to provide the location information of the mobile sink. Only those sensor nodes in a small area where the mobile sink is located need to construct weight function to find an efficient path to the mobile sink. Therefore, energy consumption caused by location update cost from the mobile sink is significantly reduced. Meanwhile, we dynamically adjust the update scope according to the location of the mobile sink, to further reduce the energy consumption. Simulation results show that our proposed method is scalable, and outperforms TNT and our previous work[9], in terms of average energy consumption per round and successful rate.