A virtual infrastructure based on honeycomb tessellation for data dissemination in multi-sink mobile wireless sensor networks

A new category of intelligent sensor network applications emerges where motion is a fundamental characteristic of the system under consideration. In such applications, sensors are attached to vehicles, or people that move around large geographic areas. For instance, in mission critical applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sinks can be associated to first responders. In such scenarios, reliable data dissemination of events is very important, as well as the efficiency in handling the mobility of both sinks and event sources. For this kind of applications, reliability means real-time data delivery with a high data delivery ratio. In this article, we propose a virtual infrastructure and a data dissemination protocol exploiting this infrastructure, which considers dynamic conditions of multiple sinks and sources. The architecture consists of ‘highways’ in a honeycomb tessellation, which are the three main diagonals of the honeycomb where the data flow is directed and event data is cached. The highways act as rendezvous regions of the events and queries.