Highly-Efficient Bulk Data Transfer for Structured Dissemination in Wireless Embedded Network Systems

Abstract

We identify the limitations of the existing structured dissemination protocols in wireless embedded network systems (WENS) and propose an out-of-order, XOR enabled transmission mechanism for structured dissemination.We propose a slot length optimization model, tailored for the proposed full-slot transmission mechanism to further enhance the propagation.We incorporate the above components into ULTRA, a full-slot reliable bulk data transfer mechanism for structured bulk data dissemination.We implement ULTRA in both testbed and simulation. The results show that ULTRA outperforms the state-of-the-art works. Recent years have witnessed the remarkable development of wireless embedded network systems (WENS) such as cyber-physical systems and sensor networks. Reliable bulk data dissemination is an important building module in WENS, supporting various applications, e.g., remote software update, video distribution. The existing studies often construct network structures to enable time-slotted multi-hop pipelining for data dissemination. However, the adopted transmission mechanism was originally designed for structureless protocols, and thus posing significant challenges on efficient structured data dissemination. In this paper, we investigate the problem of structured bulk data dissemination. Specifically, we propose reliable out-of-order transmission and bursty encoding mechanisms to transmit packets as many as possible in each transmission slot. As a consequence, the resulting transmission protocol (ULTRA) can fully utilize each transmission slot and propagate data in the network as fast as possible. The performance results obtained from both testbed and simulation experiments demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art protocols, ULTRA can greatly enhance the dissemination performance by reducing the dissemination delay by 34.8%.