An Energy-Efficient Communication Scheme for Mobile Sink Groups in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, a mobile sink group have geographically collective movement and member sinks of the group try to get same data to execute a communal mission. In order to support the mobility for such groups, it is needed to get the current location of a mobile sink group and then to offer the location to a source. Previous works for mobile sink groups provide region information of a sink group to a source. To provide the information, the previous works calculate a region including all member sinks by flooding; then, it notifies this region information to a source. However, flooding and location updates are periodically performed regardless of the group movement so that it causes considerable overhead in terms of energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient scheme supporting mobile sink groups without periodic flooding and location update. The proposed scheme calculates a location of a group without large energy consumption due to flooding. It exploits the inherent property of mobile sink groups which could approximate entire group movement by only partial member sinks movement. Also, the scheme learns group location by back-propagation learning method through exploiting overhearing feature in wireless communication environment. Our simulation studies show that the proposed scheme significantly improves in terms of energy consumption compared to the previous work.