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Published in IET Communications

Received on 18th March 2009
Revised on 9th October 2009
doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2009.0197

ISSN 1751-8628

Elastic routing: a novel geographic routing for

mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks
F. Yu1 S. Park2 E. Lee2 S.-H. Kim2
1
Key Lab of Broadband Optical Fiber Transmission and Communication Networks, UESTC, Chengdu, China
2
Department of Computer Engineering, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
E-mail: fcyu@uestc.edu.cn

Abstract: Geographic routing has been considered as an efficient, simple and scalable routing protocol for
wireless sensor networks, since it exploits pure location information instead of global topology information to
route data packets towards a static sink. Recently, a number of research works have shown that mobile sinks
can achieve high energy efficiency and load balance than static ones. In order to receive data packets
continuously, a mobile sink must update its location to the source frequently. However, frequent location
updates of mobile sinks may lead to both rapid energy consumption of the sensor nodes and increased
collisions in wireless transmissions. The authors propose a novel geographic routing for mobile sinks to
address this issue. The proposed scheme takes advantage of wireless broadcast transmission nature of
wireless sensor nodes. When a sink moves, the new location information is propagated along the reverse
geographic routing path to the source during data delivery. Analysis and simulation results indicate that elastic
routing is superior to other protocols in terms of control overhead, data delivery delay and energy consumption.

1 Introduction encapsulates the location of the sink in each data packet.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been proposed for
observation of events and environments in sensing areas
over long periods of time. A large number of sensor devices
communicate over short range wireless interfaces to deliver
the observations over multiple hops to sinks. With these
properties, WSNs are considered for many application
scenarios including battlefield surveillance, habitat
monitoring, traffic monitoring, security applications and
so on. Sensor nodes are small, simple and powered by
batteries. Since the sensor network consists of a large
number of sensor nodes, recharging them is often
infeasible. Therefore to minimise the unnecessary
transmission becomes one of the key challenges in protocol
design.
Geographic routing has been considered as an attractive
approach, since it exploits pure location information instead
of global topology information to route data packets, and
this location-based strategy makes it a more efficient,
simple and scalable routing protocol in WSNs. In a
geographic routing protocol, a source obtains the location
of a sink by some location service [1– 5] in advance and
After receiving a data packet, a node sends it to the one-
hop neighbour that is geographically closest to the sink.
Numerous geographic routing protocols have been
proposed for WSNs [6– 11], most of which are designed
for static sinks, and assume that both sensor nodes and
sinks do not change their location after deployment. Thus,
once a source obtains the location of a static sink, it can
continuously send data packets to the sink by geographic
routing. Recently, mobile sinks have been introduced into
WSNs because of two main reasons. First, mobile sinks
have been utilised as mechanical data carriers to prolong
the network lifetime. In static WSNs, the sensor nodes
close to a static sink will deplete their energy quickly
because they have to forward messages originating from
many other nodes, and thus shorten the lifetime of the
entire network [12]. If a sink can move, the sensor nodes
in the network can take turns to become the neighbours of
the sink, and thus the energy can be evenly consumed
among all the sensor nodes, and consequently, the lifetime
of the entire network can be prolonged [13]. Second, some
applications need the support of mobile sinks, such as
soldiers equipped with personal digital assistants (PDA)
move in a battlefield for enemy detection and a rescuer who

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is equipped with a PDA move in a disaster area for searching
survivals. In general, sensor nodes do not have a priori
knowledge of the moving speed and direction of the mobile
sinks. How to propagate the location of a mobile sink to
the source in real-time manner with low overhead is a
difficult issue.
In this paper, we propose a novel geographic routing
termed elastic routing, which can superiorly support mobile
sinks in WSNs. Elastic routing exploits the greedy
forwarding [6] as the data delivery protocol. An important
feature of wireless communication is that a node can
overhear transmitting packets in the neighbourhood even if
the packets are not destined for it. Elastic routing is
motivated by this overhearing feature of wireless
transmission. First, a source obtains the location of a
mobile sink by some location service and forwards data
packets to the sink by greedy forwarding. When the sink
moves, the last hop forwarding node detects the new
location of the sink and resets the sink location information
in a received data packet to the new location of the sink.
Data transmission of the modified data packet from last
hop forwarding node to the sink can be overheard by the
last second hop forwarding node. Then the last second hop
forwarding node changes the sink location information in
each subsequently received data packet and forwards them
towards the new location of the sink by greedy forwarding.
As a result, with continuous data transmission, the new
location of the mobile sink will be finally propagated to the
source. The elastic routing works like an elastic band with
one end tied to a source and another end tied to a mobile
sink. When the sink moves, the path between the sink and
the source is inflected, but finally converged to a line path
like the shrinkage of an elastic band. No significant
overhead is generated for propagating the location of a
mobile sink.
The rest of this paper is organised as follows. We
introduces the related works which also focus on the issue
of efficient data delivery to mobile sinks by geographic
routing scheme in Section 2. Section 3 describes the
proposed elastic routing in detail, and Section 4 discusses
elastic routing in special cases. We analyse the performance
of elastic routing and compare the performance with other
protocols by simulations in Section 5. Section 6 concludes
the paper.
2 Related works
Existing solutions for addressing the issue of updating
the location of a mobile sink can be classified into four
categories: full flooding-based [14 – 16], local flooding-
based [17], rendezvous points-based [18] and grid-based
solutions [19]. Full-network flooding can be further
divided into source-triggered full-network flooding and
sink-triggered full-network flooding. The source-triggered
full flooding is that a source continuously floods the sensed
data throughout the entire network. This scheme ensures
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that the mobile sink receives data packets from the sensor
nodes, but the data delivery rate may be very low because of
drastically increased collisions in transmitting flooding
packets from the sensor nodes [14]. The sink-triggered full
flooding is that a mobile sink consecutively informs its new
location information to the entire network by flooding,
such as dynamic routing protocol (DRP) [15] and gradient
broadcast (GRAB) [16], so that all the sensor nodes get
updated with the direction of sending future data reports.
However, frequent location updates from mobile sinks can
also lead to both large energy consumption of the sensor
nodes and increased collisions in wireless transmissions.
Adaptive local update-based routing protocol (ALURP)
[17] is a local flooding-based location update scheme,
which utilises an adaptive area for location update of a
mobile sink. A sink only floods it location to the nodes
within the adaptive area if the sink only moves within the
adaptive area. If the sink moves beyond the adaptive area, it
still needs to flood its location information throughout
the entire network and constructs a new adaptive area.
Although ALURP can significantly reduce unnecessary
transmissions and energy consumptions by local flooding,
the full-network flooding is also required if the sink moves
beyond the adaptive area.
To reduce the flooding overhead, a rendezvous points-
based solution, termed line proxy target detection (LPTD)
[18], was proposed for updating the location of a mobile
sink. LPTD assumes that all the sensor nodes in the
network are time synchronised and achieve the same
temporal-based hash function. A network is divided into
cells (square areas). All cells in the same row or column
become rendezvous points (line proxies) at some moment
depending on the temporal-based hash function. The
rendezvous points (line proxies) are alternated over time for
network load balance. When a sink wants to query some
event, it first calculates the rendezvous points by the same
temporal-based hash function and sends an interest
registration message to the rendezvous points, and the
interest registration message is flooded to all sensors within
the same row or column. When a source detected some
event, it sends targets registration messages to the same
rendezvous points by the same hash function. The cell
where the interest registration and targets registration are
overlapped forwards the target report to the sink. The sink
may directly send a message to ask the source for
performing continuous reporting. If the sink moves too far
away from its previous location, it achieves the same
process mentioned above. LPTD drastically avoids the full-
network flooding for location update of a mobile sink.
However, flooding interest registration message within a
row or a column band area across the entire network also
generates high overhead. The time synchronisation and
hash function of sensors are also difficult issues in WSNs.
Two-tier data dissemination (TTDD) [19] is a grid-based
approach which avoids the entire network flooding for
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location update of mobile sinks. TTDD periodically
constructs per-source-based global grid structures, each
grid point is associated with a dissemination node and
each dissemination node is aware of its upstream and
downstream dissemination nodes. A sink floods a data
query message within about a grid cell size area to find the
nearest dissemination node. Then the query message is
relayed by a series of dissemination nodes and eventually
received by the source. Then the source sends data packets
to the sink along the reverse path of the query message.
When a sink moves into another cell, it achieves the same
process described above. Flooding query messages only
within about a grid cell size is an efficient way, however,
the bigger the cell size, the wider the local flooding area,
thus more flooding overhead, whereas small grid size incurs
more overhead for the grid construction and maintenance.
Periodic per-source-based global grid constructions also
generate additional overhead.
We summarise above discussions as follows. Geographic
routing is an efficient routing protocol for WSN. In
geographic routing, the location information of a sink is
encapsulated in each data packet. To support mobile sink,
the geographic routing requires the location of the sink to
be efficiently updated to the source. The existing solutions
for addressing this issue suffer from more or less overheads
and excessive energy consumptions. Unlike wired networks,
the wireless sensor nodes forwards data packets in broadcast
manner, thus data transmission can be overheard by all
neighbour nodes. Motivated by the overhearing feature of
wireless transmission, this paper proposed a novel approach
termed elastic routing to address this issue. Elastic routing
takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless
transmission to propagate the new location of a mobile sink
to source along the reverse path of geographic routing
during data delivery. The property of stationarity of sensor
nodes makes the location propagation scheme executable.
The overhearing has been widely employed by previous
research for varying applications such as network time
synchronisation [20, 21], malicious packet-modifying
attacks detection [22] and reducing redundant
transmissions [23]. To our best knowledge, elastic routing
is the first scheme which exploits the overhearing feature of
wireless transmission to propagate the location of a mobile
sink to a source.
Figure 1 Tracing of a mobile sink
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3 Elastic routing
We assume in this work that all sensors remain static, but
sinks can move freely in the network; each node can obtain
its own location information by global positioning system
or other location services [24 – 26]; each node can obtain
its one-hop neighbour list and their locations by beacon
messages [6]. Without any specification, the greedy
forwarding referenced in the following sections is referred
as greedy perimeter stateless routing [6].
3.1 Tracing of mobile sink
To facilitate discussion, we additionally assume that all sensor
nodes have the same unit disk radio range. If two nodes are
located in the radio range of each other, then the channel in
between is bidirectional (heterogeneous radio range and radio
irregularity problem will be further discussed in Section 4.1).
In greedy forwarding, a node selects only the neighbour
node that is closest to the destination as the next hop.
Since we have assumed that all sensor nodes are static, thus
the entire routing path between the source and the sink
remains static except that some intermediate forwarding
node dies, and which leads to the change of routing path.
Fig. 1a shows a scenario of greedy forwarding. The current
location of the sink has been obtained by the source by
some sink location service. The LOOP problem which was
mentioned in [27] arises if the sink moves. In particular,
when a sink moves from its original location, before
obtaining the new location, the source still encapsulates the
original location of the sink in each data packet and
forwards them towards the original location of the sink.
If the sink moves to a new location and another node
becomes a closest one to the original location of the sink,
then this situation is misunderstood as a local maximum
by greedy forwarding. In this case, the perimeter mode is
triggered to resolve this problem. However, in this
situation, the packets normally get dropped unless the sink
comes back to near the original location and becomes the
closest node to the destination location of the packet again.
Perimeter mode generates wasteful loops in this situation.
To solve this LOOP problem, a destination location
prediction (DLP) scheme was proposed in [27]. With
DLP, each node searches its neighbour list for the sink
before it makes a packet forwarding decision based on the
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location information of sink. If the sink exists in the
neighbour list and is located within the transmission range
of the packet holder, the packet is forwarded directly to the
sink without further calculation for finding a closest
neighbour to the destination. LOOP problems can be
overcome by utilising the ID of nodes as well as location
information. A significant amount of lost packets and
wasted network resources can be saved by avoiding
misjudgement on the local maximum situation. The DLP
scheme is efficient if the sink moves within the radio range
of the last hop forwarding node A as shown in Fig. 1a.
Considering the situation in Fig. 1b, when the sink moves
outside of the radio range of the last hop forwarding node
A, the new location of the sink becomes unknown to node
A. DLP fails in this situation. Forwarding the data packet
to the node which is located closest to the location where
the sink disappeared is an intuitive but unreliable way
because of the uncertain mobility of the sink. To solve this
problem, in elastic routing, besides sending periodic beacon
messages to neighbour nodes, a sink also informs its
current location to the node from which it received the last
data packet by greedy forwarding. In Fig. 1b, when the
sink moves outside of the radio range of node A, it updates
its new location to node A by greedy forwarding, then node
A resets the sink location information in the data packet to
the new sink location and selects node B as the next hop
forwarding node to forward the subsequent data packets. In
this situation node B becomes the last hop forwarding node
to the sink. The mobility of the mobile sink can be traced
by this way. The mobile sink tracing scheme discussed
above can guarantee continuous data delivery to a mobile
sink. The function of a mobile sink is given as follows:
1. Sends beacon messages to announce its current location to
neighbour sensor nodes.
2. Checks whether it has moved outrange of the last hop
forwarding node; if so, informs its current location to the
last hop forwarding node by unicasting.
Figure 2 Location propagation of a mobile sink
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However, mobile sink also leads to detour path problem as
the real-line path shown in Fig. 1c. The detour path problem
leads to increasing of data delivery delay and total energy
consumption. An intuitive solution is that the mobile sink
updates its new location to source in real-time manner, so
that the source can encapsulate the new location of sink
into each data packet and forwards data packets to the sink
along the dashed line path, as shown in Fig. 1c. The
existing solutions [14 –19] for supporting mobile sinks
may generate more or less overhead and delay. In the next
section, we describe a new location propagation scheme
which takes advantage of overhearing feature of wireless
transmission.
3.2 Sink location propagation scheme
An important feature of wireless communication is that
a node can overhear transmitting packets in the
neighbourhood even if the packets are not destined for it.
Elastic routing is motivated by the overhearing feature of
wireless transmission, where if the channel between two
nodes is bidirectional, the data transmission from one node
can be overheard by the other node.
As shown in Fig. 2, we assume that the source has
obtained the location of the mobile sink by some location
service and forwards continuous data packets to the sink
by greedy forwarding. The mobile sink may move in three
cases: (i) the sink moves within the radio range of the last
hop forwarding node A, but outside of the radio range of
the last second hop forwarding node B, as shown in
Fig. 2a; (ii) the sink moves into the radio range of last
second hop forwarding node B, as shown in Fig. 2b and
(iii) the sink moves outside of the radio range of both
nodes A and B, as shown in Fig. 2c. In the first case, the
source sends data packets along the path source ! C !
B ! A ! sink by greedy forwarding. When the sink
moves to a new location inside the radio range of node A
but outside of the radio range of node B as shown in
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Fig. 2a, from the perspective of the source, since the
movement of the sink is unknown to the source, the source
still encapsulates the original location of the sink in each
data packet and forwards them towards the original
location of the sink. Since we have assumed that all sensor
nodes are static, the data packets are sent along the original
path source ! C ! B ! A until received by node A.
From the perspective of node A, since the sink moves
within its radio range, the new location of the sink can be
obtained by the beacon message of the sink, thus node A
first resets the location information of the sink in the
received data packet to the new location of the sink and
then forwards it to the sink directly by the DLP scheme
proposed in [27]; that is, if the sink exists in the neighbour
list and is located within the transmission range of the
packet holder, the packet is forwarded directly to the sink
without further calculation for finding a closest neighbour
to the destination. We have assumed that the channel
between two neighbour nodes is bidirectional, so when
node A forwards a data packet which contains the new
location of the sink to the sink, the transmission can be
overheard by node B, thus node B obtains and caches the
new location of the sink. Node B then resets the sink
location information in the subsequently received data
packets to the cached new location of the sink and forwards
them towards the sink by the greedy forwarding, as shown
in Fig. 2d. Node C can also obtain the new location
information of the sink by overhearing the transmission of
node B, as shown in Fig. 2e. Finally, the new location
information of the sink can be propagated to the source
step-by-step during data forwarding. Then the source
encapsulates the new location of the sink in each data
packet and directly forwards them towards the sink as
shown in Fig. 2f.
In the second case, if the sink moves into the radio range of
the last second hop forwarding node B, as shown in Fig. 2b,
then node B can directly detect the location of the sink and
resets the location information of the sink in the received
data packet to the new location and directly sends them
to the sink by DLP scheme. Node C overhears this
transmission and also resets the location information of the
Figure 3 Location propagation algorithm of elastic routing
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sink in the received data packet to the new location and
directly sends them to the sink by greedy forwarding. In
the third case, when the sink moves outside of the radio
range of both nodes A and B, as shown in Fig. 2c, the sink
detects this situation and sends its new location to node A
by greedy forwarding. Then node A resets the sink location
information in the received data packets to the new
location of the sink and then forwards them to the sink by
greedy forwarding. The following processes are the same as
other two cases described above.
The above presentations only discuss the actions of the
sensor nodes which have participated in data forwarding,
for example, nodes A, B and C in Fig. 2. How about the
other sensor nodes which are located in the radio range of
these forwarding node? From the above discussions we can
see that the new location of the sink is propagated to
source along the reverse path of greedy forwarding. Thus,
the nearer to the sink, the fresher the sink location
information is. In elastic routing, when a node overhears a
transmission, it first extracts the sink location information
in the overheard packet, then compares whether it is farther
to that location than the originator of the transmission. If
so, it records the sink location information in memory,
otherwise, it just discards it. For instance, node M
overhears a transmission from node N and the location
information in the overheard data packet is D. If
MD . ND, this means node N is closer to D than node
M, thus node M believes that node N has a fresher sink
location than itself, and so node M records location D
in memory. Otherwise, node M just discards the overheard
packet. This location propagation scheme is crucial if a
certain greedy forwarding node fails. Detailed explanation
is given in Section 4.2. The function of sensor nodes for
location propagation of mobile sinks is summarised as
follows:
1. Checks whether the sink is located in its radio range; if so,
records the sink ID and location.
2. On overhearing a transmission, for instance, node M
overhears a transmission from node N (Fig. 3).
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4 Discussions
In this section, we extend the elastic routing to heterogeneous
sensor networks and discuss the robustness of elastic routing
protocol.
4.1 Elastic routing in heterogeneous
sensor networks
The preceding descriptions are based on the assumption that
all sensor nodes have uniform unit disk radio range, that is,
the channel between two neighbour nodes is bidirectional.
A practical sensor network may have heterogeneous nodes
with different radio ranges, which leads to unidirectional
channels between neighbour sensor nodes. Another
phenomenon termed radio irregularity [28] may also lead
to unidirectional channels between neighbour sensor nodes
even though they have the same radio range. The proposed
location propagation scheme is achieved by overhearing the
next hop transmission to obtain the new location of a
mobile sink. The unidirectional channels may lead to a
node failure in overhearing the next hop transmission, thus
fails to propagate the new sink location towards the source.
To solve this problem, a symmetric geographic forwarding
(SGF) mechanism, which has been proposed in [28], can
be exploited by elastic routing. SGF allows a node to add
the IDs of all its neighbours it has discovered into a beacon
message. When a node receives a beacon message, it
registers the sender as its neighbour in its local neighbour
table, and then checks whether its own ID is in the
beacon message. If the receiver finds its own ID in
the neighbour list in the beacon message, then it marks the
channel connecting it to the sender as bidirectional.
Otherwise, it marks the channel between them as
unidirectional. Whenever a node needs to forward a packet,
it selects only those neighbouring nodes with which it is
connected through bidirectional channels. By using SGF
scheme, elastic routing forwards data packets only through
bidirectional channels, thus can guarantee that each
transmission can be overheard by the previous forwarding
node.
4.2 Failure of an intermediate
forwarding node
We have discussed that, for a static sensor network, the
location of a mobile sink can be propagated to source along
the reverse path of greedy forwarding step-by-step. It
might happen that an intermediate forwarding node fails
because of exhaustion of energy or physical destruction, for
example, node D in Fig. 4. When the sink moves to a new
location, the new location of the sink is propagated to
source along the path A ! B ! C step-by-step. However,
the propagation is terminated because of the failure of node
D. The shaded disks in Fig. 4 indicate the radio range of
corresponding forwarding nodes. All sensor nodes within
the shaded area covered by these disks have obtained the
new location of the mobile sink by overhearing the
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Figure 4 Location propagation of a mobile sink in the case
of failing of an intermediate forwarding node
transmission of corresponding forwarding nodes, as
discussed in Section 3.2. Since the location propagation of
the mobile sink was terminated because of the failure of
node D, thus the source still encapsulates the original
location of the sink in each data packet and forwards them
towards the original location of the sink. Node E detects
the failure of node D and selects node F as a new next hop
forwarding node. Since the original location of the sink
is inside the shadow area, the new greedy forwarding path
from node F certainly crosses with the boundary of the
shadow area. Thus, when a node inside the shadow area
(node G in Fig. 4) receives the data packets, it resets the
sink location information in each packet to the new
location and forwards them towards sink. At that time, the
propagation process of the new sink location can be
continued from node G towards the source.
4.3 Location update of a continuous
moving sink
In this section, we discuss the location propagation process
of a continuous moving sink. In Fig. 5, only the nodes
which need to reset the location information in the received
data packets are drawn out. The thin black arrowheaded
lines indicate the greedy forwarding path towards the
original location of the sink. When the sink moves to sink0 ,
the location of sink0 is propagated towards the source along
the path A ! B ! C step-by-step. We assume that the
sink moves to sink00 when the location of sink0 is propagated
to node D. Node D resets the location information in the
received data packet to sink0 and forwards it to sink0 directly.
However, at this time, the sink moves to sink00 and the new
location is detected by node F. Thus when node F received
the data packet from node D, it resets the sink location
in the packet to location of sink00 and forwards the data
packets to sink00 . At this time, the location of sink00 is
propagated to node G by node F. In Fig. 5, the thick real
arrowheaded lines show the data forwarding paths along
Figure 5 Location update of a continuous moving sink
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which, the sink location in all data packets were set to sink0 ; the
thick dotted arrowheaded lines show the data forwarding
paths along which, the sink location in all data packets were
set to sink00 . In short, the location of sink0 is propagated
to source along the path A ! B ! C ! D ! E and the
location of sink00 is propagated to source along the path
F ! G ! H ! I ! J. Finally, the source obtains the
location of sink00 and encapsulates the location of sink00 in
each data packet and forwards them towards sink00 directly.
From the above discussion, we can see that the elastic
routing works like an elastic band with one end tied to a
source and another end tied to a mobile sink. When the sink
moves, the path between the sink and the source is inflected,
but finally converged to a line path like the shrinkage of an
elastic band.
5 Analysis and performance
evaluations
In this section, we analyse and evaluate the performance of
elastic routing with ALURP [17], LPTD [18] and TTDD
[19]. Elastic routing exploits Column – Row Location
Service (XYLS) [5] location service to discover the location
of a sink initially. XYLS is a quorum-based location service
for WSNs, where a source sends a sink location query
message along east–west direction and a sink sends a sink
location announcement message along the south–north
direction, respectively, throughout the entire network, and the
intersection node informs the source about the sink location.
We use the following metrics for performance analysis and
evaluations: the control overhead is defined as the total
number of control packets. The average delivery delay is
defined as the average time between the moment when a
source sends a packet and the moment when a sink receives
the packet. The energy consumption is defined as the total
energy consumption for location update of mobile sinks and
data delivery. The convergence time is defined as the time
required by a source to obtain the new location of a mobile
sink. The success delivery ratio is defined as the ratio of the
number of data packet successfully received by the sink to the
number of data packets generated by the source. Owing to
the maximum length limitations, we do not analyse ALURP,
LPTD and TTDD in this paper. Detailed analysis of them
can be found in [17–19]. This section focuses on analysing
elastic routing and makes intuitive comparisons with other
protocols. The analysis results are validated by simulations.
5.1 Simulation environments
We implemented simulations in a network simulator Qualnet
3.8 and utilised IEEE 802.15.4 as the MAC protocol. The
transmission range of sensor nodes is set to 15 m. The size
of the sensor network is set to 250  250 m2, where 2000
nodes are randomly distributed. For all simulations, we use
one source– sink pair for performance evaluation. The grid
size of TTDD is set to 30 m. The width of rendezvous
points (line proxies) of LPTD is set to 20 m and LPTD
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triggers one-time location update if the sink moves 20 m
away from its previous location. The adaptive area of
ALURP is set to be a circle with radius of 20 m. In elastic
routing, the sink sends location announcement beacon
messages once it moves 1 m away from its previous
location. Elastic routing exploits XYLS [5] for initial
location discovery of the mobile sink.
5.2 Analysis and simulation results
with different moving speeds
In elastic routing, a mobile sink sends periodic beacon
messages to announce its current location and unicasts its
current location information to the last hop forwarding node
with a short distance. No other special messages are used for
location propagation of a mobile sink. Location propagation
is done by overhearing the transmission of data packets, thus
elastic routing does not generate significant overhead. In this
simulation scenario, a source which is randomly selected in
the network generates and forwards 128 bytes data packets
at a constant rate of 10 packets/s. We vary the maximum
sink moving speed from 1 to 10 m/s; a sink moves with a
random speed between 1 m/s and the maximum speed and
follows a random waypoint model. The simulation duration
is set to 500 s.
In Fig. 6a, the control overhead of elastic routing consists
of the overhead of XYLS location service for initial location
discovery of the mobile sink and a small quantity of beacon
messages sent by the sink for location announcement. Thus,
the control overhead of the elastic routing nearly remains
unchanged with the sink’s moving speed increasing. The
control overhead of TTDD consists of the overhead of
source-based grid construction and maintenance, and local
flooding within the area of about one grid size for the nearest
dissemination node discovery if the sink moves from one cell
to another. With the increasing moving speed, the number of
cells traversed by the sink also increases, thus the moving sink
requires more frequent local flooding for location update.
In LPTD, once a sink moves 20 m away from its previous
location, it needs flooding in its new location within the
rendezvous points (line proxies). In our simulation, the
rendezvous point area is larger than the grid size of TTDD.
So the local flooding overhead of LPTD is higher than that
of TTDD. However, TTDD spends more overhead for grid
structure maintenance. Thus, the total overhead of TTDD is
comparative as that of LPTD. The overhead of ALURP is
significantly higher than that of other protocols because of
frequent full-network flooding. If the sink moves within the
adaptive area, it just announces its location by local flooding
within the adaptive area, whereas if the sink moves out of the
adaptive area, it needs to flood throughout the entire network.
The metric of energy consumption is closely related to the
total transmission. Elastic routing exploits the overhearing
feature of wireless transmission for location propagation.
However, overhearing is not a special feature of elastic
routing, but a general feature of WSNs. In general, when a
IET Commun., 2010, Vol. 4, Iss. 6, pp. 716– 727
doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2009.0197

Figure 6 Simulation results with different moving speeds
a Control overhead impacted by sink mobility
b Energy consumption impacted by sink mobility
c Average delivery delay impacted by sink mobility
d Success delivery ratio impacted by sink mobility
node forwards a packet, all nodes within the node radio range
need to overhear the transmission and check whether the
packet is destined for them. A node just discards the
overheard packet if the node is not a desired receiver or a
forwarding candidate of the packet. A little difference of
the overhearing action in elastic routing is that a node
might extract the sink location information in an overheard
packet before discarding it. This extraction action does not
consume significant energy. In fact, excessive energy
consumption is incurred because of the overhead of other
protocols for location update of a mobile sink. We evaluate
the energy consumption by using the parameter values in
[29], where the energy consumption to transmit and receive
a packet during one slot are 0.0100224 and 0.0113472 mJ,
respectively. Fig. 6b shows the energy consumption of the
four protocols. Fig. 6b is similar to Fig. 6a, but the
gradient of the curves in Fig. 6b are more gentle than that
of Fig. 6a. This is because most energy is consumed for
data packets forwarding in all these protocols.
The average delivery delay of geographic routing is mostly
affected by two factors: path length and per-hop forwarding
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doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2009.0197
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delay. The per-hop forwarding delay is an inherent
characteristic in sensor networks; hence we do not discuss
the per-hop forwarding delay in this paper and just assume
that it is a fixed value tp . The average delivery delay can be
represented as follows
Pk
1 ntp
TDelay ¼ (1)
k
where k is the total number of forwarded data packets and n is
the hops between a source and a sink, thus ntp present the time
during which a packet was sent from the source to the sink.
TTDD forwards data packets along grid structure, and the
p
path length is at most 2 times the length of that of a
straight line. Thus, when the other three protocols forwards
data packets along a nearly straight-line path, the ntp of
TTDD is significantly longer than that of the other three
protocols. In both ALURP and LPTD, if a sink moves with
a relative short distance from the previous location, data
packets are sent to the previous location and then sent to the
sink in detour manner. If the sink moves far away from its
previous location, then the sink location update procedure is
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triggered. While in elastic routing, the routing path tends to be
shrunk to a straight-line path even though the sink only moves
with a short distance, thus the ntp of elastic routing is further
shorter than that of ALURP and LPTD. The simulation
results in Fig. 6c can validate this analysis result.
The success delivery ratio is mostly affected by network
collisions and the invalid location information of mobile
sinks. In other words, before obtaining the new location of
a mobile sink, a source still encapsulates the known original
location of the sink in each data packet, and this invalid
location information may lead to unsuccessful data delivery.
Fig. 6d shows the success delivery ratio of these protocols
affected by the sink mobility. Both TTDD and LPTD
exploit agent nodes to trace a mobile sink, thus the success
delivery ratio is mostly affected by collisions. In TTDD, a
mobile sink only floods within about a grid size area to find
the nearest dissemination node if the sink moves to another
grid. Although the flooding frequency is proportional to
the sink moving speed, but only flooding within a small
local area does not generate too many collisions, thus
TTDD achieves a higher success delivery ratio. The
flooding areas of LPTD are two zonal areas which spread
across the whole networks, and this leads to a wider
collision area compared to TTDD. In elastic routing, the
mobility of a sink can be traced by overhearing feature of
the last hop forwarding node if the sink does not move too
fast, and no flooding messages are required to support the
sink mobility. Thus elastic routing achieves higher success
delivery ratio. With a higher moving speed, the sink may
move out of the radio range of the last hop forwarding
node with a higher probability. In this case, the sink has to
inform its location to the last hop forwarding node by
unicasting, and the data packets forwarded by the last hop
forwarding node during this period are all dropped, thus
leads to degradation in success delivery ratio. In ALURP,
once the sink moves out of the adaptive area, it has to
construct a new adaptive area by full-network flooding, and
thus leads to a wider collision area. The data packets
delivered during this period are all dropped, thus ALURP
achieves the worst success delivery ratio among these
protocols.
Figure 7 Simulation results with different packet generation rates
a Control overhead impacted by packet generation rate
b Average delivery delay impacted by packet generation rate
c Success delivery ratio impacted by the packet generation rate
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5.3 Simulation results with different
packet generation rates
We define the packet generation rate as the rate of the packets
generated and sent by a source. Among the four protocols,
only elastic routing exploits the overhearing feature of
wireless transmission to propagate the location of a mobile
sink to the source. The overhead for location update
of a mobile sink in ALURP, LPTD and TTDD is
independent of the packet generation rate. In elastic
routing, a node obtains the sink location by overhearing the
next hop data transmission. If a sink moves with a relative
higher speed and the data packets are generated by a source
with a relative lower rate, then it might happen frequently
that a sink moves out of the radio range of the last hop
forwarding node during the interval between two times
data transmissions. In this case, the sink must send
its current location to the node from which it received the
last data packet by unicasting, and this process may
generate a little overhead. In addition, since the location of
a sink is propagated to a source by overhearing the data
transmission, thus a lower packet generation rate may lead
to a longer location propagation time. During the location
propagation time, the sink may move to another location if
the sink moves with a relative higher speed. As a result,
data packets might be delivered to the sink in a flexural
path, thus leads to a higher packet delivery delay. To verify
the above discussion, we set a source at the centre of the
network and a sink moves around the source with a
random changing speed between 1 and 10 m/s. The
distance between the source and the sink is set to 100 m
fixedly. The source generates and forwards 128 bytes data
packets at a varying rate from 10 to 0.2 packet/s. The
simulation duration is set to 500 s. Each simulation is done
ten times, and we take the average value as the simulation
results.
Fig. 7a shows the control overhead impacted by the packet
generation rate. In Fig. 7a, the packet generation rate does
not affect the control overhead of ALURP, LPTD and
TTDD, whereas the control overhead of elastic routing
increases a little if the packet generation rate is less than
IET Commun., 2010, Vol. 4, Iss. 6, pp. 716– 727
doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2009.0197

1 packet/s. In elastic routing, the location of the mobile
sink is propagated to source by overhearing feature of data
transmission. With a higher packet generation rate, the
sink location can be propagated several times within a short
moving distance, thus the sink do not require to inform its
location to the last hop forwarding node by unicasting, and
only the periodic beacon messages are required for the sink
to announce its location to the neighbour nodes. With a
lower packet generation rate, the sink may move out of the
radio range of the last hop forwarding node with a
higher probability during the interval between two data
transmissions, thus the sink need to frequently inform its
location to the last hop forwarding node. The lower the
packet generation rate is, the higher the probability
becomes. This is the reason why the control overhead of
elastic routing increases a little with the decreasing packet
generation rate. This unicasting overhead is not significant,
because the distance between the sink and the last hop
forwarding node is not too long even though with a lower
packet generation rate.
Fig. 7b shows the average delivery delay impacted by
the packet generation rate. In ALURP, LPTD and TTDD,
the data delivery path are independent of the packet
generation rate, thus keep static with the packet generation
rate, whereas the average delivery delay of elastic routing
significantly degrades with decreasing of packet generation
rate. The reason is that, in elastic routing, a source usually
encapsulates the original location of a sink into each data
packet until obtaining the new location of the sink. From
Fig. 5 we can see that if the sink is moving continuously,
the data packets are usually delivered in a flexural path. The
more flexural the path is, the higher the average delivery
delay becomes. In elastic routing, an intermediate
forwarding node directly sends data packet to a sink once
it obtains the new sink location, thus the fast the location
propagation process is, the less flexural the path is. Since
the elastic routing propagates the sink location by
exploiting the overhearing feature of wireless transmission,
so a lower packet generation rate leads to a lower location
propagation speed, thus leads to a high packet delivery
delay. From Fig. 7b we can see that the elastic routing
works well in terms of average delivery delay in case of high
packet generation rate. Supporting mobile sink with
continuous data delivery is a key design object of elastic
routing.
Fig. 7c shows the success delivery ratio affected by the
packet generation rate. The success delivery ratio of
ALURP, LPTD and TTDD are independent of packet
generated rate. While in elastic routing, by using the
overhearing feature of wireless data transmission for
location propagation of a mobile sink, a lower packet
generated rate leads to infrequent location propagation of
the mobile sink. Thus, each time the sink moves out of the
radio range of the last hop forwarding node, the data
packets sent by the last hop forwarding node during the
moment are all dropped. From Fig. 7c we can see that the
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success delivery ratio of elastic routing declines with
decreasing packets generation rate. The simulation results
of TTDD, ALURP and LPTD in Fig. 7 undulate just a
little because of the random changing speed of the mobile
sink.
5.4 Convergence time with different
distances and packet generation rates
In elastic routing, we term the time required by a source
to obtain the new location of a mobile sink as path
convergence time t. If a sink moves to a new location,
before obtaining the new location information, the source
still encapsulates the original location of the sink in each
data packet, thus data packets are sent along a flexural path
to the sink until the source has obtained the new location
of the sink. Given a source and a mobile sink, the hop
between the source and the sink travelled by greedy
forwarding is m and the data packets transmission rate is n
packets/s. According to Fig. 2, convergence time t can be
calculated as follows
8m
>
> (the case in Fig: 2a)
>
>n
>
<m  1
t¼ (the case in Fig: 2b) (2)
> n
>
>
>
:m þ 1
> (the case in Fig: 2c)
n
The reason is that the location of a sink can be propagated
with one hop progress towards the source with each time
forwarding a data packet. Thus m hops propagation
requires m times data transmission. Thus, the convergence
time t can be calculated by (2). From (2) we can see that
the convergence time t is directly proportional to the hop
distance between a source and a sink and is inversely
proportional to the packet generation rate. To verify the
above discussion, in the first simulation scenario, we set the
distance between a source and a sink to 50, 100 and
150 m, respectively, and vary the packet generation rate
from 1 to 10 packets/s to evaluate the convergence time. In
the second simulation scenario, we set the packet deliver
rate to 1, 5 and 10 packet/s, respectively, and vary the
distance between a source and a sink from 20 to 200 m to
evaluate the convergence time. In both the simulation
scenarios, the source sends data packets to the sink in a
steady-state, and then the sink moves 30 m distance around
the source with a speed of 5 m/s. The convergence time is
calculated as the time between the moment when the sink
moves and the moment when the source obtains the final
location of the sink. From Figs. 8a and b, we can see that
the convergence time t is directly proportional to the hop
distance between a source and a sink and is inversely
proportional to the packet generation rate. In summary, a
lower packet generation rate leads to a longer convergence
time and a higher data delivery delay, but we believe that
the location propagation scheme is well worth the gain in
control overhead and energy consumption.
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Figure 8 Convergence time with different packet generation rates and distances between the source and the sink
a Convergence time impacted by packet generation rate
b Convergence time impacted by the distance between the source and the sink
6 Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed a novel geographic routing scheme
termed elastic routing for supporting mobile sinks in WSNs.
Elastic routing takes advantage of the broadcast
transmission nature of wireless sensor nodes. The location
propagation of mobile sink is achieved by overhearing the
data transmission of the next hop forwarding node. The
location of mobile sink is propagated to source along the
reverse path of geographic routing during data delivery. No
significant overhead is generated for location propagation of
a mobile sink. Elastic routing works like an elastic band with
one end tied to a source and another end tied to a mobile
sink. The routing path between a source and a sink adapts
the movement of the sink in real time manner. Elastic
routing is superior to other protocols in terms of control
overhead, data delivery delay and energy consumption.
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