An Adaptive Location Service for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

How to provide the sensor nodes with the locations of mobile sinks with minimum energy consumption is a key issue to the performance of the geographic location based routing protocols. In this paper, we investigate three location update methods: Neighbour update (NUPD), Flooding update (FUPD) and Unicast update (UUPD). We get the analytical expression of energy consumption of each method. Based on the comparison results of the performance of these methods under various network conditions, we propose an adaptive location service for mobile sinks in WSN, which enables the mobile sinks to send their current location to the sensor nodes efficiently according to various data traffic characteristics, network size and node density. We evaluate the performance of our location service by comprehensive simulations and compared it with the TTDD protocol. The results show that while keeping the packet delay below an upper bound, our location update algorithm can effectively decrease the energy consumption thus prolong the network lifetime.