Exploring link correlation for efficient flooding in wireless sensor networks

Existing flooding algorithms have demonstrated their effectiveness in achieving communication efficiency and reliability in wireless sensor networks. However, fur− ther performance improvement has been hampered by the assumption of link independence, a design premise imposing the need for costly acknowledgements (ACKs) from every receiver. In this paper, we present Collec− tive Flooding (CF), which exploits the link correlation to achieve flooding reliability using the concept of collective ACKs. CF requires only 1−hop information from a sender, making the design highly distributed and scalable with low complexity. We evaluate CF extensively in real− world settings, using three different types of testbeds: a single hop network with 20 MICAz nodes, a multi− hop network with 37 nodes, and a linear outdoor net− work with 48 nodes along a 326−meter−long bridge. Sys− tem evaluation and extensive simulation show that CF achieves the same reliability as the state−of−the art solu− tions, while reducing the total number of packet trans− mission and dissemination delay by 30 ∼ 50% and 35 ∼ 50%, respectively.