An Efficient Route Maintenance Scheme for Wireless Sensor Network with Mobile Sink

Data transmission from source to sink is the most common functionality in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). When transmitting to a mobile sink, the connection of the last hop to the mobile sink breaks very often, so the route to the sink needs to be reestablished frequently. In such a scenario, sink mobility management is essential to support service continuity in WSNs. In this paper, an efficient route maintenance scheme is proposed to handle the sink mobility. In the proposed scheme, different states are introduced to the sensor nodes, and some special nodes close to the mobile sink report their state changes. With the help of exchanged state information, the sensor nodes around the mobile sink can take proactive and timely actions to achieve fast and seamless route reestablishment. The advantages of the proposed scheme over other conventional schemes are verified by numerical analysis and simulation