A high-reliability data gathering protocol based on mobile sinks for Wireless Sensor Networks

With the booming development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), enormous surges of attentions have put to the research of mobile data gathering strategies for WSNs in recent years. In this paper, a high-reliability data gathering protocol based on mobile sinks (HRDG-MS) for WSNs is proposed. In the protocol, the mobile sinks move randomly and send BEACON packets periodically. Meanwhile, the sensor nodes that have route(s) to mobile sinks send DATA packets which include the state information of the nodes and their distance to mobile sinks. By the aid of DATA packet and BEACON packet, the whole network can establish and maintain the routing information without any extra route packet and location information. To achieve load-balance, three factors are taken into account when deciding the next-hop. What´s more, in order to reduce the packet loss ratio caused by the mobility of sinks, two novel approaches are adopted in the proposed protocol, i.e. No-RouteBuffer mechanism and adaptive BEACON interval strategy respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing work in packet loss ratio.