Prioritizing Bad Links for Fast and Efficient Flooding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks provide distributed sensing and processing to a wide range of applications that operate in different environments. To be able to perform their intended duties, one of which is relaying information to other nodes in the network, a routing protocol is needed. One possible building block in a routing algorithm is to use a flooding protocol. In this paper we present an efficient flooding protocol called received signal strength-aided flooding (RAF). This protocol utilises the signal strength of a received broadcast message for its rebroadcast decisions by prioritising nodes with communication links that have low reliability. The proposed protocol has a number of key features that makes it resource efficient: no additional overhead in the broadcast message; no location information; no neighbour knowledge. The simulation results show both a lower number of rebroadcast nodes and longer lifetime expectancy for RAF than that of the optimised broadcast protocol. These results and its features makes the RAF protocol a good candidate to be used as a building block in more advanced wireless sensor network protocols.