Agent-Based Multipath Management for Supporting Sink Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sink mobility support is one of the essential functionalities in many applications. With continuous advancement, future applications will require not only sink mobility support but also high-performance data delivery service. Multipath routing is one of the promising technologies for improving data delivery performance by collaboratively using alternative or redundant multiple routing paths. However, existing multipath routing protocols had not dealt with sink mobility. As a result, they lead to bad performance in terms of energy efficiency due to the end-to-end path reconstruction. Consequently, a novel multipath management scheme is required thereby supporting sink mobility without performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a multipath management scheme for supporting sink mobility. The proposed scheme dynamically constructs multipath along the moving path of a sink. In addition, the proposed scheme provides the path shortening schemes according to the sink’s movement for reducing energy consumption. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme is superior to existing path management schemes in terms of reliability and energy efficiency.