SmartGossip: an improved randomized broadcast protocol for sensor networks

We investigate four performance metrics for randomized broadcast protocols on sensor networks: the fraction of nodes that receive the message (coverage), the number of first-time receivers per transmission (energy efficiency), the node-average normalized time till reception (per hop latency), and the average number of control messages per node (overhead). Our focus is to evaluate the extent to which the exchange of local information (either active or passive) can improve protocol performance. To this end, we study via simulation three protocols from the literature that exploit local information and compare their performance against the well known GOSSIP1 protocol, which does not employ any local information in making transmission decisions. Our findings are that i) local information is of course quite valuable in increasing protocol performance, and ii) it is possible to obtain high coverage and efficiency but one must then incur either increased delay or increased overhead. We study the strengths and weaknesses of the above protocols and propose the new SmartGossip protocol, which combines several ideas from the above protocols, as well as several new mechanisms, to achieve superior performance.