A Novel Greedy Forward Algorithm for Routing Data toward a High Speed Sink in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sink nodes are responsible for aggregating data gathered by a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and transmitting them to a monitoring facility. Usually, these are static nodes that serve as gateways to infrastructured networks. In some applications, these sink nodes move around the monitoring area, usually in lower speeds (e.g., robots, dirigibles). In this work, we go further and study WSN scenarios in which sink nodes can move at higher speeds, such as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or even an airplane. In these cases, propagated queries cannot be answered by using the sink´s position when the query was sent, since the sink will be elsewhere due to its high speed. Thus, we propose and evaluate the performance of three algorithms for data query in WSNs when the sink is moving at a high speed. Our results show clearly the need for new algorithms for these scenarios as well as the good performance of our proposed algorithms.