GCRP: Grid-cycle routing protocol for wireless sensor network with mobile sink

Energy conservation is a critical issue in resource constraint wireless sensor networks. Employing mobile sink to deliver the sensed data becomes pervasive approach to conserve sensors' limited energy. However, mobile sink makes data delivery a hard nut to crack since nodes need to know its latest location. Providing sink's latest location by traditional flooding, erode the energy conservation goal. In this paper, we propose a Grid-Cycle Routing Protocol (GCRP) with the aim of minimizing the overhead of updating the mobile sink's latest location. In GCRP, sensor field is partitioned into grid of cells and for each cell a grid cell head (GCH) is elected. Cycles of four GCHs is formed. Cycle(s) involving border GCHs is called exterior cycle and said to belong to a region. Another cycle involving non-boundary GCHs is called interior cycle, connecting GCHs of different regions. When sink stays at one location, it updates the nearest GCH, which in turn updates the other GCHs through exterior and interior cycle. Moreover, we propose a set of sharing rules that govern GCHs when and with who share sink's latest location information. The performance of GCRP is evaluated at different number of nodes and compared with existing work using NS-2.31.