Virtual tube storage scheme for supporting mobile sink groups in wireless sensor networks

Abstract The research on mobile sink groups such as platoons in battlefields and firefights in disaster areas have been actively studied as a challenged and interesting issue in wireless sensor networks. For supporting mobile sink groups, the formation of effective data storage is one of the important design factors for energy-efficient and reliable data delivery to them by considering their mobility. Various data storage schemes have been proposed for mobile sink groups and they are usually categorized into two approaches: a point-based storage one and an area-based storage one. The point-based storage approach is very efficient when a mobile sink group has a small number of member sinks or it has a large-scale group region. On the other hand, the area-based storage approach only when a mobile sink group has a large number of member sink and it has a small-scale group region. In other words, these two approaches are suitable only for special cases of mobile sinks groups. Thus, this paper proposes a Virtual Tube Storage (VTS) scheme for efficiently supporting general cases of mobile sink groups in wireless sensor networks. We first present design principles of data storage and data dissemination. Then, we describe the method to efficiently construct a virtual tube storage based on the design principle of data storage. Next, we describe the process to disseminate data from a source node to a mobile sink group via the virtual tube storage based on the design principle of data dissemination. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than the existing point-based storage and area-based storage schemes in terms of energy-efficiency and reliable data dissemination.