A Geographical Cellular-Like Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The mobility of sink and stimulus brings a huge challenge to WSN. It wishes that the location update packets be continuously transmitted through the sensor network to keep the data path between the sink and the source node sensing the stimulus. Unfortunately, frequent location update packets would not only result in excessive energy consumption of sensor node with highly energy constraint, but also increase the communication collision in wireless propagation. In this paper we propose a novel Geographical Cellular-like Architecture (GCA) for WSN, which can efficiently manage the mobility of both sink and stimulus. GCA proactively builds a cellular-like structure assisted by the geographical location of each node, where each cell includes a header and several members. The header acts as the role of base station in cellular network, receiving the information from sink and forwarding the data report; the members just take charge of watch-ing the target. Meanwhile, the hierarchical design of GCA can also save energy remarkably. The performance of GCA is evaluated through analysis and the simulation in ns2, which demonstrates that GCA is an efficient solution to mobility in WSN.

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No60373010), National 973 Project Fund of China (No 2003CB314801).