MSTBBN: M-way Search Tree Based Base Station to Node Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Inexpensive sensors capable of significant computation and wireless communication with limited energy resources are available. Once deployed, the small sensor nodes are usually inaccessible to the user, and thus replacement of the energy source is not feasible. Hence, energy efficiency is a key design issue that needs to be enhanced in order to improve the life span of network. Several network layer protocols like LEACH, BCDCP, and PEDAP have proved very useful and efficient for Node to Base Station (BS) communication. However, these centralized protocols have no explicit support for BS to Node communication. In some scenarios, BS to Node communication may be very frequent. In such cases trivial solution of flooding may prove to be a very costly solution. We introduce here M-way Search Tree Based Base station to Node communication protocol (MSTBBN) for Wireless Sensor Networks, which can be used to provide Base Station to Node communication. MSTBBN can be used with any of the centralized data-centric protocols (like LEACH-C) without any significant message overhead. Our solution provides efficient communication with time complexity of O(h) hops where h is the height of the BS-rooted tree constructed by the underlying routing protocol.