A fault-tolerant data dissemination based on Honeycomb Architecture for Mobile Multi-Sink wireless sensor networks

In mission critical applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), multiple sinks can be associated to first responders such as firefighters, but also to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In such scenarios, data dissemination of events towards mobile sinks should be performed reliably. In this paper we present Honeycomb Architecture which enables data dissemination considering dynamic conditions of multiple sinks and sources. Honeycomb Architecture exploits a virtual infrastructure called ‘highways’, which is an area where all event data are cached. The ‘highways’ act as rendezvous regions of the events and queries. Once a query is issued, it is sent to one of the ‘highways’ and searches relevant data stored in the ‘highway’. When the data is found, it is sent to the sink which has issued the query. Our data dissemination protocol is fault-tolerant, i.e., it can bypass holes in the network. We evaluate and compare the data delivery ratio and latency of our data dissemination protocol with previous approaches. We also analyze the hotspot regions in the network with different protocols. Simulation results show that our work significantly reduces overall energy consumption while maintaining comparably high data delivery ratio.