Evaluation and improvement of collective flooding in WSNs with various link correlations

Abstract

One of the main challenges confronted by wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to reduce energy consumption of nodes for the purpose of network lifetime extension. In the literature, many backbone based protocols such as connected dominating set (CDS) and broadcast or multicast based protocols are employed in order to improve network performance in terms of metrics like energy consumption, number of transmissions and dissemination delay. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a recently proposed transmission protocol known as collective flooding (CF), which is based on link correlation, under various link correlation conditions. Through simulations and analyses we demonstrate that although CF performs well in most cases in comparison with CDS and multicast based protocols, weak link correlation could cause serious performance degradation for CF based data transmissions. Accordingly, we propose two techniques and demonstrate that they improve significantly the performance of CF under weak link correlation.