Energy-aware routing to a mobile gateway in wireless sensor networks

Almost all of the energy-aware routing protocols that have been proposed for wireless sensor networks aim at optimizing network performance while relaying data to a stationary gateway (sink). However, mobility of the gateway can make routes established through such contemporary protocols, unstable and non-optimal. The use of mobile gateways introduces a non-traditional trade-off between the need for frequent re-routing to ensure optimal network operation and the desire for minimizing the overhead of topology management. In this paper, we propose an energy aware mechanism for efficient and continual data delivery to a moving gateway. Our approach tracks the distance of the gateway from the last hops to the gateway, and dynamically adjust the routes either via increasing the last hop nodes' radio ranges or introducing new forwarder nodes as part of the routes. Rerouting is triggered when the current routes become unacceptably inefficient. The presented approach is validated in a simulation environment.