Dynamic sink oriented tree algorithm for efficient target tracking of multiple mobile sink users in wide sensor field

In a wide sensor field, it is difficult to track location of moving targets to just fixed sinks, since data aggregation can be slower than the movement of targets. In such applications, some of mobile sink users can be directly injected to the sensor filed. So, in recent, the problem handling multiple mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks is becoming another rising issue. However, it is difficult for the links connected to the sink to be maintained since links are easy to be broken. In this paper, we introduce efficient target tracking scheme through dynamic Sink Oriented Tree (SOT) Algorithm for multiple mobile sinks. The SOT is maintained by partial link Reversal algorithm to adapt the mobile sink environment. The main objective of our proposed algorithm is to efficiently deliver location information of targets to the multiple mobile sinks. Since our protocol can construct and dynamically maintain the SOTs although the sinks moves continuously, data aggregation from target nodes to sink can be efficiently achieved through the SOT and also, in-network processing in the process to be aggregated is naturally achieved. In addition, coverage of tracking of each mobile sinks is wider by dynamically merging the each sink's SOTs. Also, we evaluated our protocol in terms of how robust it is by examining the packet loss rate with respect to the sink speed.