Movement Direction Based Path Selection Strategy in Converged Cellular and Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been applied in many service application areas, which consist of numerous autonomous sensor nodes with limited energy. In order to optimize the wireless sensor networks performance and meanwhile expand the cellular network´s service applications, mobile cellular networks and wireless sensor networks are evolving from heterogeneous to converge. However, the sensor nodes need to be informed the mobile sink´s location for data collection purpose. Unfortunately, frequent location updates from multiple sinks can lead to both excessive drain of sensors´ limited battery supply and increased collisions in wireless transmission. In this paper, we describe the movement direction based path selection strategy which adopts the grid structure and provides an efficient mobile sink´s location updates approach. When the sinks have mobility, they only inform their current locations to the specific nodes on the previous path instead of the source nodes. We evaluate the proposed method through both analysis and extensive simulations. The results show that our proposed theory not only provides an energy-efficient location update approach, but also generates a minimal delay path for data dissemination.