A Dissemination Protocol to Guarantee Data Accessibility within N-Hops for Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the major challenges of designing a dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is energy efficiency. Flooding and SPIN, which are very well-known proactive methods, spontaneously disseminate the sensed data without a request from an arbitrary sink node. However, these proactive protocols disseminate the data even to some nodes that do not need it, which is energy inefficient. In order to overcome this weakness, we introduce a novel semi-proactive protocol to disseminate only to pertinent nodes instead of all nodes. Thus some nodes, such as arbitrary sink nodes that want the sensed data, are able to obtain the data easily within n hops. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol has higher average node energy efficiency than that of well-known earlier work, SPIN. If a proactive protocol, such as SPIN, is changed to semi-proactive and has only a 1-hop burden, then the energy efficiency enhancement is up to 83.7% compared with SPIN.