HCDD: hierarchical cluster-based data dissemination in wireless sensor networks with mobile sink

Finding the routing path for disseminating data to mobile sinks in the wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem due to the random mobility of sinks and the limited resources of sensors, such as energy, storage capacity, and computing capability. Although flooding the location information of mobile sinks seems to be a naive method to find the path between the data source and the mobile sink, it drains much power of the sensor nodes. Thus, we propose a Hierarchical Cluster-based Data Dissemination scheme, named HCDD, to disseminate data to the mobile sink with light control overhead. In HCDD, the sensor nodes are self-organized to find the route without the knowledge of node's location information. That is, unlike other works, the HCDD can operate without any expensive and power-consuming GPS device used for estimating the location information. The simulation results show that our HCDD scheme can greatly alleviate the control overhead, and, at the same time, achieve longer network lifetime and comparable number of received data with previous works, such as the TTDD-like methods.