Novel sink-oriented approach for efficient sink mobility support in wireless sensor networks

Mobile sinks pose several challenges for network protocol design. While moving, a sink should continuously update its topological position information in the sensor nodes to maintain paths. This may require large signaling overhead, resulting in excessive energy consumption. Various schemes have been proposed to reduce the path management overhead. In many of these schemes, the sinks only maintain paths from active sources to reduce the overhead. While reducing the path management overhead, this approach introduces other problems. In this paper, a novel path management scheme, Net Cast Routing (NCR), is proposed. NCR provides ceaseless connection from every sensor node to every sink in an efficient manner. Since it does not distinguish active sources from other sensor nodes, its performance is not affected by the number or movement of the sensing targets. In addition, unlike multicast based schemes [2, 3, 4], NCR does not require any subscription procedure to active sources.