Origin-Mediated Sink Mobility Support for Large-Scale Phenomena Monitoring in IWSNs

Large-scale phenomena monitoring such as fire or toxic gas monitoring is one of major applications in industrial wireless sensor networks. A multitude of sources stemming from a large-scale phenomenon brings heavy communication overhead to report data to a sink. Many researches have focused on monitoring a large-scale phenomenon and reporting to a static sink with an energy-efficient way. Recently, large-scale phenomena monitoring needs a mobile sink for real-time response. However, the sink mobility support in large-scale phenomenon monitoring brings challenging issues. Given the existing approaches to support sink mobility in individual object detection, a mobile sink should establish one-to-many communication with all sources of a large-scale phenomenon for location update. The one-to-many communication between a mobile sink and all sources triggers early energy depletion and thus reduces the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose the origin-mediated communication scheme exploiting a hierarchy-based architecture to resolve the one-to-many communication problem. The origin node builds the virtual backbone network to propagate a location update message on behalf of the mobile sink. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms all the other work and exhibits significant amounts of savings in terms of the entire network's energy consumption.