A Self-Organizing Concurrent Global Information Dissemination Scheme for Sensor Networks

In this paper we propose a distributed and self-organizing scheme for establishing efficient energy-saving concurrent data dissemination for wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol is aimed at applications where all sensor nodes need to provide their current data concurrently and periodically back to the sink, whist having an option to provide instantaneous individual node data upon sensing. Hence, the scheme provides a hybrid time-driven and an event-driven mechanism. The scheme initially establishes the hopcount of sensor nodes from the sink and identifies the highest hopcount nodes (HHN) of the sensor network. An application scenario is the periodical recovery of the global extremity value back to the sink by only using the HHNs for initiating the broadcast, which inherently traverses all sensor nodes due to the nature and position of such nodes. This approach can hence effectively retrieve sensor data from all nodes concurrently in its target application. Furthermore, the scheme provides a platform for other data-centric protocols to efficiently and concurrently disseminate data from all nodes in the network.