Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are characterized by their low bandwidth, limited energy, and largely distributed deployment. To reduce the flooding overhead raised by transmitting query and data information, several data-centric storage (DCS) mechanisms are proposed. However, the locations of these data-centric nodes significantly impact the power consumption and efficiency for information queries and storage capabilities, especially in a multi-sink environment. This paper proposes a novel dissemination approach, which is namely the dynamic data-centric routing and storage mechanism (DDCRS), to dynamically determine locations of data-centric nodes according to sink nodes' location and data collecting rate and automatically construct shared paths from data-centric nodes to multiple sinks. To save the power consumption, the data-centric node is changed when new sink nodes participate when the WSNs or some queries change their frequencies. The simulation results reveal that the proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols in terms of power conservation and power balancing. Copyright © 2009 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd.