Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks for Mobile Target Detections

In battlefields, the wireless sensor network can be used for target detection and data collection. However, the mobility of targets as well as the sinks creates challenges for the design and implementation of the system. While there are research proposals capable of handling multiple mobile sinks, these protocols either assume the knowledge of sink location or create too many flooding, leading to a quicker energy consumption. To deal with this issue, we propose a framework for data collection in wireless sensor networks, namely Dynamic and Adaptive Grid (DAG). In our framework, we take the advantages of both grid and tree data structures to route queries and data efficiently. In addition, two mechanisms are introduced to balance the load in the network. The first one helps to distribute the tasks more evenly; and the second one adjust the size of grids to balance the traffic load in each grid. Last, an improved query aggregation is proposed to reduce the query response time and the traffic associated with each query. The simulation results show that DAG outperforms the best known data collection solutions for wireless sensor networks with multiple mobile targets and sinks.