LOGR: Joint LOcalization and Geographic Routing-based Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sinks

Data dissemination and node localization are key components of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), since the position of sensor nodes should be known so that applications can map events detected by those sensors. In this paper, we propose a joint localization algorithm that utilizes the position of a mobile sink, e.g., a vehicle, and of the neighbor nodes to estimate the position of nodes with no GPS modules. A data dissemination algorithm is proposed based on the well-known Greedy Geographic Forwarding (GGF) algorithm by combining the position of the neighbors and their remaining power when deciding where to send a packet to. The concept of bridges is also introduced, in which the sink compares its current position with previous positions and calculates whether there is a shortest path in order to create a bridge that will reduce the number of hops a packet has to travel through. According to our performance evaluation experiments, LOGR shows a slight improvement on network lifetime compared to GGF, while keeping similar delivery ratio performance. Including the power level of nodes in the forwarding decision equation tends to increase the path length to the sink. However, results show that bridges can minimize this increase by shortening the path.