Abstract
In wireless sensor networks, utilization of mobile sinks is effective in reducing energy consumption thus enhancing the network lifetime longevity and improving connectivity. Most of the data delivery schemes which support sink mobility assume the construction of virtual hierarchies of either backbone or rendezvous nodes. These designated nodes try to minimize the communication overhead of tracking mobile sink by avoiding network-wide flooding of sink location updates. However, timely and efficient construction of such virtual infrastructure prior to actual data delivery is a challenging task in networks which mainly consist of resource constrained sensor nodes. In this paper, a neighbor-assisted sink tracking scheme is described that provides efficient data delivery to the mobile sink without requiring virtual hierarchies. In the proposed scheme, nodes within the close proximity of sink collaborate and provide feedback on its connectivity with rest of the network. Through extensive simulations under several multi-hop traffic scenarios, it is shown that the proposed scheme performs significantly better in terms of energy consumption, success ratio and latency with a static and mobile sink.