PL-Gossip: Area Hierarchy Maintenance in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

PL-Gossip is evaluated using packet-level event-driven simulator. Experiments are conducted with varying network sizes, densities, message loss rates, and node arrival and departure schemes . The experimental results verified that a node´s state, as maintained by the protocol (i.e., the label and the routing table), grows logarithmically with the network size, which ensures scalability and small bandwidth requirements. In addition, the hierarchical network organization offers efficient routing: the average hop stretch does not exceed 25%. Moreover, the hierarchy is quickly bootstrapped or restored, also under significant node population changes, which minimizes disruptions caused to the applications. Finally, the experiments confirmed what the authors proved analytically, that is, the protocol recovers the network from any massive node failure or network partitioning, even when such incidents happen continuously and concurrently. PL-Gossip is also implemented in TinyOS. The implementation is subject to real-world tests while at the same time being integrated into a large-scale real-world system.