Using Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks to Improve Building Emergency Response

We propose an opportunistic routing scheme for wireless sensor networks operating in volatile environments. In particular, we consider a sensor field for sensing and reporting on buildings during fires, where sensors are progressively being destroyed by the fire. We envisage firefighters equipped with small computers which can act as mobile sink nodes, offering transient shorter routes for relaying data, and offering connectivity to disconnected areas of the network. We examine different ways in which these uncontrolled mobile sinks could enhance performance, and develop protocols for advertising the presence of the mobile sinks, gathering data for forwarding, and prioritising disconnected regions. We evaluate the performance in simulation, and on randomly damaged networks, we show that we can increase the data delivery by up to 50%.