A lightweight multicast approach based on bloom filters for actuator-sensor-actuator communication in WSANs

Abstract

Some applications of wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) require to operate in large-scale remote environments where natural barriers (e.g., relief and vegetation) may hinder the direct intercommunication of network devices. In this context, to ensure the communication between multiple actuators through the network of sensors is essential. The literature regarding multiple actuator communication consists in costly approaches based on unicast routing. In line with this, in a previous study, we proposed a routing protocol named multicast border oriented forward routing protocol (M-BOFP), whose communication between actuators is performed by multicast on top of the network of sensors. M-BOFP implements Bloom filters, a probabilistic data structure with low memory cost, to achieve the multicast communication with low message overhead. In this paper, we qualitatively compare M-BOFP to the literature and present the results of a comprehensive performance evaluation considering small, moderate and large-scale WSANs.