DDRP: An efficient data‐driven routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Introduction of mobile sinks into a wireless sensor network can largely improve the network performance. However, sink mobility can cause unexpected changes of network topology, which may bring excessive protocol overhead for route maintenance and may offset the benefit from using mobile sinks. In this paper, we propose an efficient data‐driven routing protocol (DDRP) to address this problem. The design objective is to effectively reduce the protocol overhead for data gathering in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks. DDRP exploits the broadcast feature of wireless medium for route learning. Specifically, each data packet carries an additional option recording the known distance from the sender of the packet to target mobile sink. The overhearing of transmission of such a data packet will gratuitously provide each listener a route to a mobile sink. Continuous such route‐learning among nodes will provide fresh route information to more and more nodes in the network. When no route to mobile sink is known, random walk routing simply is adopted for data packet forwarding. Simulation results show that DDRP can achieve much lower protocol overhead and longer network lifetime as compared with existing work while preserving high packet delivery ratio. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.