M-geocasting for mobile sink groups in wireless sensor networks

Geocasting has been known as the appropriate scheme for providing effective data dissemination from a source to all nodes in a geographically restricted region. However, since the geocasting typically assumes the restricted region is stationary, it is hard to directly adopt the traditional geocasting in order to offer effective data delivery to mobile sink groups that have geographically collective mobility. Hence, this paper proposes a novel geocasting, called M-Geocasting (Mobile Geocasting) to support mobile sink groups. M-Geocasting provides the representative location information of a sink group to sources. The location information contains information in terms of a restricted region in which all member sinks of the group exist. A source disseminates data to the closest node in the region; then, the node restrictedly floods the data only within the region. Also, to support local movement of member sinks toward out of scope of the region, some nodes on boundary of the region maintain the data and offer it to member sinks out of scope of the region. We have evaluated M-Geocasting performance through simulation experiments, and our results show that M-Geocasting effectively supports mobile sink groups that have geographically collective mobility.