A correlation-based coverage-aware and energy-balanced probabilistic flooding algorithm

Aiming at the costly explicit and implicit acknowledgements (ACKs) and the serious energy imbalance of the existing flooding algorithm, a correlation-based coverage-aware and energy-balanced probabilistic flooding algorithm (CCEP) is proposed in this paper. CCEP distinguishes previous flooding algorithms with three features: (1) it exploits the link correlation between neighbours; the one-hop neighbours that have high link correlation are assigned to an aggregate explicit or implicit acknowledgement (aggregate ACK), thus effectively ameliorating the ACK implosion problem and saves energy on both data transmit and ACKs; (2) it balances the residual energy of sensor nodes; (3) it achieves target reliability and energy efficiency by tracking real-time aggregate ACKs and probabilistically deciding whether to retransmit a packet. The simulation results reveal that CCEP saves more than 50% energy on explicit and implicit ACKs in most cases while achieving target reliability; CCEP simultaneously reduces network variance of residual energy, thus prolonging the network lifetime.