Adaptive Information Brokerage in Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

We study the problem of information brokerage in sensor networks, where information consumers search for data acquired by information producers. Traditional methods to sovle this problem use one or more common sensor nodes as rendezvous node/nodes to store data replicas for consumers to retrieve, e.g., geographical hash table (GHT). Thus, the rendezvous nodes take much more load than other nodes and die much earlier. In this paper, we propose a mobile sink storage scheme (MSS) which takes mobile sinks as the rendezvous nodes instead of common sensor nodes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use mobile sinks to solve this problem. We show by simulation that MSS can reduce and balance the energy consumption in comparison with previous adaptive information brokerage schemes.