A Context and Content-Based Routing Protocol for Mobile Sensor Networks

The need of monitoring people, animals, and things in general, brings to consider mobile WSNs besides traditional, fixed ones. Moreover, several advanced scenarios, like those including actuators, involve multiple sinks. Mobility and multiple sinks radically changes the way routing is performed, while the peculiarities of WSNs make it difficult to reuse protocols designed for other types of mobile networks.

In this paper, we describe CCBR, a Context and Content-Based Routing protocol explicitly designed for multi-sink, mobile WSNs. CCBR adopts content-based addressing to effectively support the data-centric communication paradigm usually adopted by WSN applications. It also takes into account the characteristics (i.e., context) of the sensors to filter data.

Simulations show that CCBR outperforms alternative approaches in the multi-sink, mobile scenarios it was designed for, while providing good performance in more traditional (fixed) scenarios.