A Communication Architecture to Reflect User Mobility Issue in Wireless Sensor Fields

Typical sensor networks consist of users, sinks, and a number of sensor nodes. The traditional architecture usually assumes that there is a legacy network between users and sinks. However, practical users like firefighters and soldiers move around sensor fields and they might not have any direct communication through legacy networks. In other words, sensor networks are the only communication channel between users and sinks in practical sensor fields. Now there are no researches with respect to architecture to support the user mobility. Thus it is necessary to deliberate a new architecture for such the issue. In this paper, a novel communication architecture was presented where a user operates around an infrastructureless sensor field. A new networking model was then proposed, named dynamic sink model, to support user mobility on the novel architecture. In the model a sink is temporarily selected among generic sensor nodes by a user when the user wants to get information from a sensor network. The chosen sink gathers data from sensor nodes for interested tasks and propagates collected information to the user via the sensor network. The performance of the dynamic sink model on the novel architecture was evaluated and explored with regard to average delay, delivery ratio, and network lifetime compared with the common static sink network model on typical communication architecture.