A clustered trail-based data dissemination protocol for improving the lifetime of duty cycle enabled wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of unmanned and self-organized sensor devices deployed on a target region for monitoring and target tracking purposes. Therefore, extending the lifetime of WSNs is critical to their proper operation. Static sink schemes have been studied extensively and several solutions were proposed to extend the lifetime of WSNs. Such static solutions are known for their bottleneck in the vicinity of a sink, where sensor nodes are more likely to be used as data forwarding points to a nearby sink. These nodes carry most of the data traffic and consequently deplete their energy resources faster than nodes deployed far off static sinks, which end up creating blind spots or even network partitions. A partitioned, i.e., disconnected network will cease to function properly in view of sink stations becoming unreachable. The consensus reached by the research community to solve this bottleneck, or at least to alleviate traffic and energy consumption near data sinks, is the use of mobile sinks. To this end, this paper presents a new data dissemination strategy (eTrail) that combines clustering, trail generation, and sleep scheduling techniques to extend network lifetime even further. Network lifetime is modeled and analyzed by means of a continuous time Markov chain. In addition, an extensive set of simulation experiments is presented and discussed. Results show that eTrail outperforms existing schemes in terms of network lifetime, while maintaining acceptable packet delivery reliability and latency.