Improving packet reception rate for mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

Researchers have recently exploited the use of mobile sinks in WSN and shown its potential benefits in energy savings. In order to maximize these savings and meet other QoS requirements, the mobile sink should collect all the data from the sensors during its limited contact time. This necessitate the provisioning of appropriate mechanisms to improve packet reception rate (PRR) from sensor nodes to the sink while efficiently utilizing underlying resources. In this paper, we conducted actual experiments to understand the reasons behind failures in packet reception. Accordingly, we exploited the use of multiple receiver radios in mobile sinks. Through actual experiments, we evaluated the performance gains provided by multi-radio mobile sinks. We observed that using multiple receiver radios significantly improves base PRR and achieve required PRR with less number of retransmissions, particularly in critical communication ranges. In turn, minimizing number of transmissions improves other performance metrics including overall delay, efficient use of energy at sensor nodes, network lifetime.