General Sink Location Service Based on Circle and Line Paths in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, a geographic routing requests source nodes (sensor nodes) to know location information of destination nodes (sinks) to send their data. To address this issue, many sink location service schemes have been proposed in the literature. They are designed to support only one communication mode such as unicast, anycast, manycast, or multicast communication modes. However, because an application can have one or more communication modes or a sensor network can operate several applications with each communication mode, it is necessary for a scheme to support all communication modes. Hence, we propose a general sink location service scheme for supporting all communication modes. The proposed scheme modifies the basic idea of the existing one proposed for unicast communication mode and extends it for supporting all communication modes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is superior to other sink location service schemes when supporting all communication modes. Index Terms-Wireless sensor networks, Sink location service, Circle and line path, Unicast, Anycast, Manycast, and Multicastmanycast, or multicast communication modes. A number of sink location service schemes [4-8] have been proposed, including schemes [4, 5] for unicast, one [6] for anycast, one [7] for manycast, and one [8] for multicast, in WSNs.However, a sensor network can operate an application which has one or more ones among unicast, anycast, manycast, and multicast communication modes or several applications which have each other communication mode. Accordingly, it is necessary for a general sink location scheme to support all communication modes in such sensor network. However, in WSNs, there have been not proposed any sink location service scheme which has a goal for supporting all communication modes. Although some sink location service schemes can support all communication modes, they are very inefficient. Moreover, to support all communication modes, operating each scheme for each communication mode in a sensor network brings about much overhead to sensor nodes. Therefore, we propose a general sink location service scheme for efficiently supporting all of unicast, anycast, manycast, and multicast communication modes. For the proposed scheme, we borrow the basic idea from the previous scheme [5] proposed for unicast communication mode, which guarantees at least crossing point between a circle path of a Sink Location Announcement (SLA) message and a line path of a Sink Location Query (SLQ) message. The proposed scheme modifies the basic idea of the scheme for unicast communication mode and extends it for anycast, manycast, and multicast communication modes. Like the previous scheme, in the proposed one, each sink constructs only a circle path but in each other location and each source constructs only a line path irrespective to communication modes but to circle paths requested according to them. Simulation results shows that the proposed scheme has better performance than the existing sink location service schemes...