Cross-Layer Counter-Based Flooding without Location Information in Wireless Sensor Networks

The flooding is the simplest and effective way to disseminate a packet to all nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). However, the basic flooding makes all nodes transmit the packet at least once, resulting in the broadcast storm in a serious case, in turn network resources become severely wasted. Particularly, power is one of the most valuable resources for WSNs as nodes are powered by battery, then the waste of energy by the basic flooding lessens the lifetime of WSNs. In order to solve the broadcast storm problem, this paper proposes a cross-layer approach that utilizes both the signal strength and the counter for duplicate packets. Simulation results substantiates that the proposed method outperforms previous flooding methods in respect of the number of duplicate packets and packet delivery ratio.