Expected Area-Based Real-Time Routing Protocol for Supporting Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

To deliver real-time data within a desired time deadline, a spatiotemporal approach has been proposed in wireless sensor networks. In the approach, real-time data can be delivered with a delivery speed calculated by both the distance from a source to a static sink and the desired time deadline. In the case of a mobile sink, because the distance from a source to the sink would be dynamically changed due to its movement, real-time data cannot be delivered due to the inability to calculate a delivery speed. Thus, we propose a novel real-time routing protocol, called EAR2 (expected area-based real-time routing) for mobile sinks. Instead of the immediate distance, EAR2 considers the static distance to the expected area of a mobile sink’s location using its movement speed. To satisfy the desired time deadline, EAR2 guarantees that the total summation of the unicasting time to the expected area and the flooding time within the expected area can be smaller than the deadline. To do this, EAR2 calculates a data delivery speed by using the static distance and the unicasting time and exploits the flooding time observed from various network environments. Because EAR2 has a high flooding time and data loss problems due to a single flooding point, we propose a protocol called EAR2M with multiple flooding points, which reduces the flooding time and enhances the reliability of data transmission. We also propose two extensions of EAR2M, called EAR2M_R and EAR2M_E for efficient data transmission from a source to multiple flooding points. They aim to reduce the transmission delay and the energy consumption for efficient data transmission among multiple flooding points, respectively. Simulation results show that EAR2 improves the deadline miss ratio and the energy consumption, with averages improvements of 47.17% and 29.99% over the existing schemes, respectively. Furthermore, EAR2M with four flooding points enhances the deadline miss ratio and the energy consumption by an average of 12.69% and 131.86% over EAR2.