A dependability-aware approach for dynamic mobile sink repositioning in smart cities applications

The use of a mobile sink in wireless sensor networks has been a game changing to enable the development of smart cities applications. The mobility feature allows more effective data gathering and energy saving in the network, since the sink can be closer to source nodes, which could activate their radios only when the sink approximates. Doing so, more efficient settings can be achieved when configuring and deploying sensor nodes for a myriad of applications. However, this mobility-centric strategy can generate applications scenarios with large delays when sensor networks are monitoring the environment, which may result in considerable data losses in critical applications. To cope with that, this paper proposes an algorithm to dynamically plan the repositioning of a single mobile sink within distributed sensing applications. The algorithm considers dependability requirements associated with network connectivity, operability, and energy consumption, implicitly minimizing the energy-hole problem and connectivity issues. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate how the can be applied to move the sink through the network meeting dependability requirements.