E2SR2: An acknowledgement-based mobile sink routing protocol with rechargeable sensors for wireless sensor networks

The advances in hardware manufacturing technologies and wireless communications enabled the evolution of tiny, multi-functional, low-power and resource constrained sensor nodes (SNs) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). SNs located in sinks vicinity, deplete their batteries quickly because of concentrated data traffic near the sink, leaving the data reporting wrecked and disrupted. In order to mitigate this problem, mobile sinks are introduced that provide uniform energy consumption and load balanced data delivery through the sensor network. However, advertising the mobile sinks position information brings forth additional overhead in terms of energy wastage. Recently, an energy-efficient distributed mobile sink routing protocol named ring routing has been proposed aiming to mitigate the introduced overhead. In this present work, we propose an Energy Efficient Secured Ring Routing (E2SR2) protocol which is an enhancement of existing ring routing protocol [62] that considers rechargeable sensors to be deployed in the sensing region and employs Maximum Capacity Path (MCP), a dynamic load balanced routing scheme for load balancing and prolonging the networks lifetime. Furthermore, we use 2ACK scheme that serves as an efficient mechanism for detecting the routing misbehaviour and simultaneously enhance the security. Finally, the proposed protocol was simulated by varying the sink speed for similar node deployments and the results obtained confirm that the proposed E2SR2 achieves improved performance than the existing protocols such as LBDD (Line Based Data Dissemination), rail road and ring routing.