A Quadtree-Based Data Dissemination Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

The envisioned sensor network architecture where some of the nodes may be mobile poses several new challenges to this special type of ad hoc wireless network. Recently, researchers have proposed several data dissemination protocols based on some hierarchical structure mainly constructed by a source node to support mobile sinks. However, such a source-initiated hierarchical structure results in significant resource consumption as the number of source-sink pairs are increased. Additionally, stimulus mobility aggravates the situation, where several sources may build a separate data forwarding hierarchy along the stimulus moving path. In this paper, we propose a new data dissemination protocol that exploits “Quadtree-based network space partitioning” to provide more efficient routing among multiple mobile stimuli and sink nodes. Simulation results show that our work significantly reduces average energy consumption while maintaining comparably higher data delivery ratio.