RISE: RIpple Sink Exploration in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

With routing paths being modified after each sink movement, delivering data to a mobile sink in a wireless sensor network (WSN) can be a challenging issue. Updating the sink location with messages to maintain a route frequently could result in great energy consumption in the sensors. Moreover, the number of message collisions is proportional to the control overhead of the sink location update. This paper develops a RIpple Sink Exploration scheme, or RISE, to efficiently guide the data to the mobile sink. The source which generates the raw data explores the sink location with no knowledge of node locations. The design proposed in this paper allows for updating sink locations without any bottleneck affects. Simulation results show that the RISE scheme saves more energy than previous designs, achieving greater network longevity. Also, RISE can be applied to a multiple-sink scenario with a small updating cost.