DTOR: Dynamic Tree Organizing Routing for Mobility Support in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) basically perform a function to collect sensing data by the request of users. The request is forwarded to a corresponding gateway (GW), and the GW collects data from a sensor or a group of sensors. In this scenario, the destination of each sensing data is only the GW where each data is collected through a different path. This implies that the topology in this environment would be a tree-structure where traditional collection based routing protocols may be suitable to support WSNs without mobility support. However, recent WSNs, which support the mobility of each sensor node, cannot collect data correctly using existing collection based routing protocols since the destination GW can be changed during data transmission. To resolve this problem, we propose a collection based routing protocol, called dynamic tree organizing routing (DTOR), for mobility support in WSNs where we use two types of messages, beacons and advertisements, for energy-efficient topology management and fast handover detection. Furthermore, we select a link based on the weighted link estimation where both the link quality and the node type are taken into account. DTOR shows better performance than existing schemes with only beaconing in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, end-to-end latency and delivery ratio by using the node advertisement, the efficient link estimation, and the adaptive beaconing.