An Energy-Efficient Data Dissemination Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Fast, reliable and energy-efficient data dissemination is one of the essential features for applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Since the mobile sink was first introduced to the WSNs to prevent the hot spot problem which usually exists in static sink approaches, a number of data dissemination protocols that support sink mobility have been proposed in recent years. In the first part of this thesis, we present a comprehensive state-of-art overview of the major mobile sink protocols. Although many of them have made an effort to minimize the overhead of sink location updates and to maximize the energy efficiency, most of the protocols failed to concern one important fact that sensor energy consumed during the idling state is a major part of the overall energy consumption and dominates the network lifetime. Moreover, the protocols themselves are faced with all kinds of pending issues. Therefore, in the second part of this thesis, we propose E-Trail, a new data dissemination protocol for WSNs with mobile sinks, which combines a simple yet efficient trail generation scheme with a novel sleep-wake mechanism that lets the redundant sensors turn off their radio and sleep for a certain period of time. Experiments are carried out with the network simulator ns-2 to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol. The simulation results indicate that E-Trail significantly saves sensor energy and improves network lifetime, while its other network performances such as data delay, control overhead and delivery rate are still maintained at a similar or even better level compared to selected protocols.