Sink mobility has long been recognized as an efficient method of improving system performance in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), e.g. relieving traffic burden from a specific set of nodes. Though tremendous research efforts have been devoted to this topic during the last decades, yet little attention has been paid for the research summarization and guidance. This paper aims to fill in the blank and presents an up-to-date survey on the sink mobility issue. Its main contribution is to review mobility management schemes from an evolutionary point of view. The related schemes have been divided into four categories: uncontrollable mobility (UMM), path-restricted mobility (PRM), location-restricted mobility (LRM) and unrestricted mobility (URM). Several representative solutions are described following the proposed taxonomy. To help readers comprehend the development flow within the category, the relationship among different solutions is outlined, with detailed descriptions as well as in-depth analysis. In this way, besides some potential extensions based on current research, we are able to identify several open issues that receive little attention or remain unexplored so far.

The Evolution of Sink Mobility Management in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Due to a battery constraint in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), prolonging their lifetime is important. Energy-efficient routing techniques for WSNs play a great role in doing so. In this paper, we articulate this problem and classify current routing protocols for WSNs into two categories according to their orientation toward either homogeneous or heterogeneous WSNs. They are further classified into static and mobile ones. We give an overview of these protocols in each category by summarizing their characteristics, limitations, and applications. Finally, some open issues in energy-efficient routing protocol design for WSNs are indicated.

Recent Advances in Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

Deployment strategies in the wireless sensor network

Introducing mobility to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) puts new challenges particularly in designing of routing protocols. Mobility can be applied to the sensor nodes and/or the sink node in the network. Many routing protocols have been developed to support the mobility of WSNs. These protocols are divided depending on the routing structure into hierarchical-based, flat-based, and location-based routing protocols. However, the hierarchical-based routing protocols outperform the other routing types in saving energy, scalability, and extending lifetime of Mobile WSNs (MWSNs). Selecting an appropriate hierarchical routing protocol for specific applications is an important and difficult task. Therefore, this paper focuses on reviewing some of the recently hierarchical-based routing protocols that are developed in the last five years for MWSNs. This survey divides the hierarchical-based routing protocols into two broad groups, namely, classical-based and optimized-based routing protocols. Also, we present a detailed classification of the reviewed protocols according to the routing approach, control manner, mobile element, mobility pattern, network architecture, clustering attributes, protocol operation, path establishment, communication paradigm, energy model, protocol objectives, and applications. Moreover, a comparison between the reviewed protocols is investigated in this survey depending on delay, network size, energy-efficiency, and scalability while mentioning the advantages and drawbacks of each protocol. Finally, we summarize and conclude the paper with future directions.

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A Comprehensive Survey on Hierarchical-Based Routing Protocols for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks: Review, Taxonomy, and Future Directions

Communication protocols for wireless sensor networks: A survey and comparison

Wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks, mWSNs, have attracted a lot of attention recently. This is because sink mobility can greatly alleviate the hotspot issue in WSNs and further prolong the network lifetime. However, sink mobility also causes unexpected changes in network topology and data routing paths, which can largely affect the routing performance in such networks. Design of efficient routing protocols for mWSNs has been a critical issue, and much work has been carried out in this aspect. In this article, we first classify existing protocols based on different design criteria and then present a survey of the state-of-the-art routing protocols in this area. We illustrate how each of the protocols works, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we point out some future directions for efficient routing in mWSNs.

Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks: a survey

In this paper, we study the issue of mobility scheduling for mobile data collector (MDC) in wireless sensor networks. Most existing work in this area focuses on geometric-based optimization without considering the spatial correlation among different locations. In this paper, we study the mobility scheduling problem from the informative perspective by using Gaussian process to capture the spatial correlation of real world phenomena. Based on the Gaussian process model and collected sensing data from a number of sensor nodes in the network, one can predict the sensing values at the remaining interesting locations and can further estimate the prediction accuracy. This approach can potentially shorten the length of data collection tour with small penalty in data accuracy. We use the mutual information maximization criteria to evaluate the quality of a data collection tour. We accordingly formulate the informative mobility scheduling problem which finds the data collection tour with the maximal mutual information under certain mobility constraint. The problem is shown to be NP-hard and we accordingly propose two efficient heuristic algorithms. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms by comparing them with geometric-based algorithms through extensive simulations and the results show that our algorithms can return much shorter tours while achieving the same level of data quality.

Informative mobility scheduling for mobile data collector in wireless sensor networks

Designing efficient routing protocols for a wireless sensor network with mobile sinks (mWSN) is a challenging task since the network topology and data paths change frequently as sink nodes move. In this paper, we design a novel lightweight reactive ring based routing protocol called R3, which removes the need of proactively maintaining data paths to mobile sinks as they move in the network. To achieve high packet delivery ratio and low transmission cost, R3 combines ring based forwarding and trail based forwarding together. To support efficient ring based forwarding, we build a ring based structure for a network in a way such that each node in the network can easily obtain its ring ID and virtual angle information. For this purpose, we artificially create a virtual hole in the central area of the network and accordingly find a shortest cycled path enclosing the hole, which serves as base ring and is used for generating the remaining ring based structure. We accordingly present the detailed design description for R3, which only requires each node to keep very limited routing information. We derive the communication overhead by ring based forwarding. Extensive simulation results show that R3 can achieve high routing performance as compared with existing work.

R3 : A Lightweight Reactive Ring based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

In this paper, we design a novel lightweight ring-based routing protocol (LRRP) for wireless sensor network with mobile sinks (mWSN). The design objective is to significantly reduce the protocol overhead for route discovery and management while preserving high routing performance. For this purpose, LRRP builds a base ring by finding a shortest cycled path surrounding an artificially created topological hole in the network and, based on the base ring, it builds a ring-based structure to cover remaining nodes in the network and further assigns them ring IDs and virtual angles to ease the packet forwarding. LRRP works in a hybrid way for routing updates and packet forwarding. Specifically, each mobile sink (MS) dynamically chooses agent nodes, one on each ring, to proactively update its reachability as it moves. Each data packet is forwarded using ring-based forwarding along a pre-selected ring until reaching an MS or an agent node with path to an MS, from which the packet will be directly forwarded towards the MS. LRRP further considers how to achieve a good tradeoff between energy balancing among different rings and data path lengths. Extensive simulation results show that LRRP can significantly reduce the protocol overhead and achieve prolonged network lifetime as compared with existing work while achieving a very high packet delivery ratio.

A lightweight ring-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Design of efficient routing protocols has been a critical issue in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks (mWSN). In [1], Yu et al. proposed a distributed lightweight ring based routing protocol for mWSNs, which builds a multi-ring based network structure by creating a quasi-polar coordinate system on the network in order to support efficient ring based routing. However, in [1], only average case routing performance was reported via simulations. In this paper, we derive the asymptotical path-length performance of the ring based routing via extensive analyses. We hope the results reported in this paper can be helpful for understanding the characteristics of ring based routing.

Sheng Yu

Papers

Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks: a survey

Informative mobility scheduling for mobile data collector in wireless sensor networks

R3 : A Lightweight Reactive Ring based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

A lightweight ring-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Asymptotical Performance of Ring Based Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks with a Mobile Sink: An Analysis