Target-aware, transmission power-adaptive, and collision-free data dissemination in wireless sensor networks

Software update in wireless sensor networks requires the ability of disseminating bulk data to specified sensors of a network with low latency in an energy efficient manner. This paper proposes a target-aware, transmission power-adaptive, and collision-free data dissemination protocol to fulfill these requirements. This protocol disseminates data to sensors of a network by first constructing a connected dominating set (CDS) in the network. We propose a target-aware CDS construction to exclude many unnecessary non-target sensors from the data dissemination process. By allowing some dominators of the CDS to increase their transmission power to disseminate data to more dominatees, the protocol efficiently reduces the total energy consumption. In addition, we propose a collision-based channel assignment strategy to eliminate communication collisions among dominators so as to reduce latency. We have implemented the protocol and evaluated it through simulations and a real application scenario. Our experimental results show that the proposed protocol at most reduces non-target sensors by 75.3%, total energy consumption by 57.1%, and latency by 39.8% compared to existing dissemination protocols.