Distributed mobile sink support in wireless sensor networks

Data transmission from sources to sink is the most common service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) but sink mobility brings new challenges to it. How to keep the sensors informed of the current state of the mobile sink is the primary issue for the mobile sink management. In this paper, we propose a distributed mobility management scheme that uses a set of access points (APs) to support the data transmission from sensors to mobile sink. Compared with existing sink mobility support algorithms like the broadcast based method, TTDD and LURP, our approach eliminates network wide broadcast while balancing the communication overhead over all APs. A theoretical analysis shows that while the number of source nodes below certain threshold, our approach outperforms the network wide broadcast and local broadcast approaches in view of communication overhead for ranges of network parameters such as network size and mobile speed. The simulation results match the analysis very well and proved the advantage of proposed algorithm.