Providing scalable location service in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Location-based routing has been considered as an efficient routing paradigm for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The performance of location-based routing highly depends on the way the position information of mobile sinks are updated and managed, which is the typical function of location service. Frequent location updating can improve the location accuracy at the expense of additional communication overhead. In this study, the authors propose a scalable location service for supporting efficient location-based routing in WSNs with mobile sinks. The proposed location service enables each sensor node to locate its closest (mobile) sink with low overhead. Analytical and simulation results show that it can significantly reduce the communication overhead for providing location service while maintaining high routing performance.