RaWPG: A Data Retrieval Protocol in Micro-Sensor Networks Based on Random Walk and Pull Gossip for Communicating Materials

A new area is coming with communicating materials which is able to provide diverse functionalities to users all along the product lifecycle. These materials can track their own evolution all along the product lifetime, gather helpful information and thus allow information continuum at all time and everywhere. These functionalities are fulfilled via the integration of thousands of specific electronic components into the product's material. This paper forms part of this framework in considering that thousands of micro-sensor nodes are integrated into the material. Specific wireless sensor network (WSN) storage protocols were recently proposed for communicating materials, that uniformly replicate information in the integrated nodes. To extract this information during the product lifecycle, a dedicated WSN data retrieval protocol called random walk and pull gossip data retrieval protocol (RaWPG) is presented in this paper. Unlike well-known literature protocols, RaWPG avoids request flooding because all data are uniformly replicated in WSN. With usual protocols, this may lead to high response duplication rate. RaWPG employs three mechanisms. First, the random walk is used as multihop process to forward the request to further nodes. Then, the pull gossip mechanism is added to interrogate the neighbor nodes during each hop. Finally, a mechanism called farthest neighbor selection is added. Only the farthest and most powerful neighbor is selected as next hop for improving the transmission reliability of request and response messages. The performances of the proposed protocol are evaluated based on a case study, and compared to results obtained with classic approaches issued from the literature.