On Aggregation Based Routing for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The recent technological advances in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSN) have expanded the range of WSN applications. In some of these applications, sensor nodes are mobile rather than static. Also, the recent advances in personal digitals assistants (PDAs) allow the existence of multiple mobile sinks to collect the sensors data. These characteristics require the design of new routing protocols to meet the existence of mobile sensors and multiple mobile sinks while taking into consideration the limited resources for sensor nodes especially energy. In-network aggregation is one of the important techniques used to save power consumption by aggregating the data on sensor nodes before transmitting towards the sinks and hence reducing the number of transmissions required. This thesis presents ABRM which is an in-network aggregation based routing protocol for mobile sensor networks with multiple mobile sinks. Compared to CCBR, ABRM yields good aggregation results in addition to a great reduction in power consumption and routing cost. The thesis also proposes three enhancements to ABRM, specifically enhancing the reaction of ABRM towards multiple interests and regarding sink movement, and adapting the beaconing period. These enhancements target to improve the aggregation results and reduce the routing overhead and power consumption. These enhancements are compared to ABRM through theoretical analysis and simulation results. The comparisons show that the enhancements reduce routing overhead, energy consumption, and increase the overall performance of ABRM. Keywords: aggregation, mobile, sensors, wireless, networks, routing, WSN, MSN