E-TRAIL: Energy-Efficient Trail-Based Data Dissemination Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

Reliable, fast and energy-efficient data dissemination is one of the essential features for several applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the dawn of WSNs, data delivery techniques considered only static data sinks. However, static sink approaches place a considerable burden on sensor nodes surrounding the sinks in terms of traffic and energy consumption. Eventually, data dissemination techniques for WSNs with mobile sinks have been proposed to alleviate the traffic issues of static sink approaches and improve network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a new data dissemination strategy that combines a simple but efficient sleep schedule technique with a trail generation mechanism. Simulation results show that the proposed E-TRAIL protocol significantly improves network lifetime while maintaining similar data delivery success performance when compared to the selected approaches.