Analytical Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructures for Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

Abstract : In this paper, we address the problem of data dissemination in wireless sensor networks (WSN) with mobile sink(s). In such a context, the difficulty is for sensor nodes to efficiently track the sink and report the requested data to the sink location. As flat architectures and flooding-based protocols do not scale, overlaying a virtual infrastructure over the physical network has often been investigated as an interesting strategy for an efficient data dissemination in wireless sensor networks. This virtual infrastructure acts as a rendez-vous area for queries and data reports. The main contribution of this paper is to make an analytical comparative study of a variety of virtual infrastructure topologies. The communication cost and the path stretch are evaluated both in the worst and average cases. Finally, existing data dissemination protocols are compared on different applications scenarios.