Scalable and robust data dissemination in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are appealing in obtaining fine-granular observations about the physical world. Due to the fact that WSNs are composed of a large number of low-cost but energy-constrained sensor nodes, along with the notorious time-varying and error-prone nature of wireless links, scalable, robust, and energy-efficient data disseminating techniques are requisite for the emerging WSN applications such as environment monitoring and surveillance. To meet this challenging demand, we propose a hybrid data dissemination framework for WSNs in this paper. In particular, we conceptually partition a whole sensor field into several functional regions and apply different routing schemes to different regions in order to provide better performance in terms of reliability and fair energy usage. For this purpose, we also propose a novel zone flooding scheme, essentially a combination of geometric routing and flooding techniques. Our scheme features low overhead, high reliability, good scalability, and notable flexibility. Simulation studies are carried out to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme.