Grid-Based Real-Time Data Gathering Protocol in Wireless Sensor Network with Mobile Sink

Recently, mobility-enabled wireless sensor networks have been exploited to improve energy efficiency at the cost of increased latency. In this paper, we propose a Grid-based solution for Real-time Data Gathering application with mobile sinks (GRDG). Like many hierarchical structures, the flexible virtual grid partition scheme based on power control is designed to enhance network scalability, reduce routing hop counts, and ensure balanced energy consumption. Moreover, in order to decrease the transmission latency and cater for real-time application requirement, a local routing tree updating approach is presented. Although the quickly constructed routing tree is not optimal, communication overheads are decreased significantly.