Cluster-Based Communication for Mobile Sink Groups in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

In large-scale wireless sensor networks, in order to support group mobility of mobile sinks, this letter proposes a novel strategy for energy-efficient and robust data dissemination to the sinks based on cluster-based communication. The novel strategy is composed of two major mechanisms for reduction of structure construction overhead and routing state maintenance overhead: 1) a virtual infrastructure construction through grid-referred clustering and 2) inter-cluster communication by geographic routing relying on recursive location search. Based on the two major mechanisms, the strategy provides representative location management per sink group, distributed data collection, and per-cluster foot-print chaining in order to effectively adapt the traditional strategy for individual mobile sinks. Simulation results prove the proposed strategy shows better performances in terms of energy efficiency and robustness of data dissemination. key words: data dissemination, group mobile sinks