Heuristic data dissemination for mobile sink networks

Mobile sinks have advantages such as solving the hotspot problem which occurs because some sensor nodes deplete energy faster than others and enhancing energy balance among the sensor nodes. However, sink mobility raises two challenges, frequent location updates and packets delivery delay. To tackle these two problems, this work proposes a protocol that involves two mechanisms. First, to reduce the frequent location updates of the mobile sink to all sensor nodes, we proposed an accessible virtual structure (Double Ring) that acts as an intermediate structure between the sink and the sensor nodes when exchanging metadata and query packets. Second, to accelerate packets delivery, we proposed a heuristic data dissemination protocol, called HDD, in which the heuristic function is based on four values, direction, transmission distance, perpendicular distance, and residual energy. The experimental results showed that our proposed protocol outperforms the state of art protocols in terms of energy consumption, delivery rate, latency, and network lifetime.