Energy-efficient routing for wireless sensor networks with a mobile sink

The concentration of data traffic towards the sink in a wireless sensor network causes the nearby nodes to deplete their batteries quicker than other nodes, which leaves the sink stranded and disrupts the sensor data reporting. To mitigate this problem the usage of mobile sinks is proposed. Mobile sinks implicitly provide load-balancing and help achieving uniform energy-consumption across the network. However, adver- tising the location of the mobile sink to the network introduces an overhead in terms of energy consumption and packet delays. In this thesis, we propose a new routing protocol, Ring Routing, which aims to minimize this overhead while preserving the advantages of mobile sinks. It is a distributed, energy-efficient mobile sink routing protocol that minimizes data reporting delays, and hence is suitable for real-time ap- plications. We evaluate the performance of Ring Routing via extensive simulations conducted in OPNET.