Virtual Line-Based Data Dissemination for Mobile Sink Groups in Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile sink groups such as rescue teams or platoons bring about a new challenging issue for handling mobility in wireless sensor networks. Recently, a flooding-based technique has been proposed to disseminate data to a mobile sinks group. However, since it simply use flooding of data within the sink group region, it leads to high energy consumption of sensor nodes and low data delivery ratio to sinks due to the broadcast storm problem. Thus, this letter proposes a protocol called Virtual Line-based Data Dissemination (VLDD) to achieve energy-efficient and reliable data dissemination. Instead of flooding, VLDD exploits a Virtual Line Structure (VLS) for data storage within the group region. While sources store their own data on the VLS, each sink retrieves data from the VLS at its location in a time of need. Analysis and simulation results show that VLDD achieves better performance than the existing protocol.