A Lightweight and Density-Aware Reprogramming Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose ReXOR, a lightweight and density-aware reprogramming protocol for wireless sensor networks using XOR. It employs XOR encoding in the retransmission phase to reduce the communication cost. In sparse and lossy networks, it delivers much better performance than Deluge, a typical reprogramming protocol for sensor networks. Compared to prior coding-based reprogramming protocols, it has two salient features. First, it is computationally much more lightweight than previous coding-based reprogramming protocols using Random Linear Codes or Fountain Codes. Second, it is density-aware by adapting its interpage waiting time. Hence, it achieves good performance in both dense and sparse networks. We have implemented ReXOR based on TinyOS and evaluate its performance extensively. Results show that ReXOR is indeed lightweight compared with previous coding-based reprogramming protocols in terms of computation overhead. The results also show that ReXOR achieves good network-level performance in both dense and sparse networks, compared with Deluge and a typical coding-based reprogramming protocol, Rateless Deluge.