A cross-layer approach for efficient flooding in wireless sensor networks

Due to the high node density and stringent constraints on the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks, designing an energy efficient flooding scheme with high reachability is critical for the operation and the lifetime of sensor networks. Many existing flooding approaches address the needs of general ad hoc networks. In contrast, this paper presents a cross-layer approach tailored specifically to the needs of sensor networks. Without assuming location awareness, a novel MAC layer access-deferring scheme, based on the received signal power, is proposed to reduce the collision possibility and broadcast redundancy. Local neighborhood information is piggybacked onto the broadcast packet, and exploited to enhance the reachability. Simulation results show that compared with probabilistic flooding, this scheme has good performance in terms of reachability, average delay and energy efficiency. Moreover, we examine how the range estimation error and neighborhood information inaccuracy introduced by the fading environment affects the performance of our flooding scheme.