An Energy Efficient Data-Centric Probing Priority Determination Method for Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Many methods have been researched to prolong sensor network lifetime using mobile technologies. In the mobile sink research, there are the track based methods and the anchor points based methods as representative operation methods for mobile sinks. However, the existing methods decrease Quality of Service (QoS) and lead the routing hotspot in the vicinity of the mobile sink. The reason is that they use static mobile paths that are not concerned about the network environments such as the query position and the data priority. In this paper, we propose the novel mobile sink operation method that solves the problems of the existing methods. In our method, the probing priority of the mobile sink is determined with the data priorities for increasing the QoS and the mobile features are used for reducing the routing hotspot. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces query response time and improves network lifetime over the existing methods.