Convex groups for self-organizing multi-sink wireless sensor networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks have long been proposed for rescue scenarios to support and coordinate the efforts of helpers. Low power wireless sensor networks are a natural extension of this approach. They can provide valuable environmental data enriched with location information to deepen the insight of the operational area. Gateways between these two communication paradigms are necessary to facilitate the collaboration of both systems. We study such multi-sink wireless sensor network scenarios and explore the use of convex groups to efficiently disseminate location dependent information, for example, for query distribution. Convex groups show significant advantages in terms of message overhead compared to straightforward approaches without sacrificing connectivity. They do not exhibit high computational complexity and handle node mobility as well as gateway mobility gracefully. ©2009 IEEE.