Reliable Data Dissemination with Diversity Multi-Hop Protocol for Wireless Sensors Network

Abstract

The growing needs to support efficient data communications in wireless sensor networks (WSN) cannot be ignored. The resource constrained nature of WSN requires it to efficiently transmit the data with little consumption of network resources. We present a gossip based K - BackTrack (KBT) reliable data dissemination protocol for unstructured ad-hoc WSNs1. The goal of our proposed protocol is to ensure reliable data delivery and, at the same time, keeping the overhead associated with reliability low. The basic idea we employ is that each node to delay the acknowledgement message until it reaches Kth hop in the WSN. Then the Kth node then acknowledge the receipt of the message to the source directly. By increasing the value of K, we can minimize the network traffic. Moreover, the data dissemination in our proposed protocol exhibits low bandwidth cost (by minimizing the acknowledgement) and increases network lifetime (since critical sensors, ie. close to the control center are not overused). Through extensive experimental evaluation and comparison, our findings demonstrate that our protocol achieves significant improvements in energy efficiency and network lifetime.