Abstract: In wireless sensor networks, data gathering using mobile sink, has drawn significant amount of interests in recent years. To achieve this, some of the approaches focus on scheduling the mobile sink’s moving path in advance or focus on gathering little amount of data in the network. In certain cases when the mobile sink moving trajectory cannot be planned in advance, in order to avoid the traffic in updating sink locations, an energy efficient data reporting protocol is designed. This protocol is called as SinkTrail and is mainly used for collecting the data using multiple mobile sinks. SinkTrail protocol constructs a logical coordinate system without using GPS devices. SinkTrail-S protocol is designed which is an improved version of SinkTrail protocol, reduces the energy consumption and eliminates the unnecessary control messages in the network. Mobile sinks are positioned at certain node locations so that the route length in transmitting the data packets would be reduced and reduces the total energy consumption.

Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, mobile sinks, logical coordinate system, data reporting.