A Spanning Routing Tree protocol based on State Diffusion for mobile sensor networks

For some special applications, the mobile sensor network is more suitable than static sensor network. When sensors become mobile, connectivity assurance and energy saving become two challenges. In this paper, we propose the SRTSD (Spanning Routing Tree protocol based on State Diffusion) and SRTSD-DA (SRTSD with Data Aggregation) protocols to ensure the connectivity and to save energy. In the two protocols, before transmission of sensor data, the routing trees are built by the diffusion of nodes state messages beginning from the sink node. In addition, the SRTSD-DA can conserve a lot of energy with the use of data fusion and aggregation techniques. The protocols are distributed, and the sensor nodes do not require knowledge of the entire network. Simulation results show that SRTSD and SRTSD-DA have excellent performance on connectivity assurance and energy saving.