Energy-Efficient Flooding Mechanisms for the Wireless Sensor Networks

Most of the data transmissions in the sensor network are based on flooding. The original flooding causes the implosion and the overlap problems, so flooding may result in the reduced network lifetime of the sensor network with limited resources. Therefore, in order to reduce the overhead by flooding, we propose the flooding overlay structure (FOS) which adopts the concept of the overlay network so that the overhead caused by flooding can be reduced. We propose two types of FOS mechanisms, the centralized FOS (CFOS) and the distributed FOS (DFOS). CFOS is for the static sensor network in which the sink can select forwarding nodes more effectively. And DFOS is proposed for the more dynamic sensor network environment. To provide the network connectivity in DFOS, the concept of the notice delay is introduced. We have carried out simulations for our FOS mechanisms and the original flooding, and shown that our FOS mechanisms outperform the original flooding in many performance aspects.