Continuous data dissemination protocol supporting mobile sinks with a sink location manager

Tree topology information gathering protocols has been proposed in order that sinks can efficiently collect continuous data. In other words, sensor network initially constructs connection structure from sources to sinks. After that, continuous data are delivered to sinks through the connection structure. These protocols, although, could not be applied to the model of mobile sinks because the connection structure should be frequently changed. For supporting mobile sink model, many grid based protocols has been developed. These protocols, although, have problems in the case of gathering continuous data because they should frequently generate same query in the whole networks as movement of the sinks. In this paper, we propose efficient data dissemination protocol that can gather continuous data by only one query in the model of mobile sinks. The important contributions of our protocol are two as follow. First, it has no connection structure from source to sink for supporting mobile sinks and delivers data to the sinks via geographic routing. Second, mobile sinks provide SLM, Sink Location Manager, with its current location information for the purpose of only one query. In other words, when sources detect some data related to the query, they obtain location information of sinks from SLM and transmit the data to sinks by geographic routing. These characteristics, only one query for same query and no connection structure, could extend lifetime of sensor networks and save data transmission energy of sensor nodes. Finally, we evaluate performance of our protocol by computer simulation.