SinkTrail: A Proactive Data Reporting Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract:

                  Existing system works on two energy efficient proactive data reporting protocols, Sink Trail(shortest path) and Sink Trail-S(energy consumption), for mobile sink-based data collection. The proposed protocols feature low complexity and reduced control overheads. In order to gather data from network, we periodically send out a number of mobile sinks into the field. A data gathering process starts from the time mobile sinks enter the field and terminates when: either 1) enough data are collected (measured by a user defined threshold); or 2) there are no more data report in a certain period. The Sink Trail protocol is proposed for sensor nodes to proactively report their data back to one of the mobile sinks through shortest path. In Sink Trail, flooding trail messages to the whole network can be nontrivial in terms of energy consumption. To further optimize the energy usage and eliminate unnecessary control messages in the network, we propose Sink Trail-S algorithm as an improvement to the original Sink Trail.