Sprinkler: A Reliable and Energy Efficient Data Dissemination Service for Extreme Scale Wireless Networks of Embedded Devices

We present Sprinkler, a reliable data dissemination service for wireless embedded devices which are constrained in energy, processing speed, and memory. Sprinkler embeds a virtual grid over the network whereby it can locally compute a connected dominating set of the devices to avoid redundant transmissions and a transmission schedule to avoid collisions. Sprinkler transmits O(1) times the optimum number of packets in O(1) of the optimum latency; its time complexity is O(1). Sprinkler is tolerant to fail-stop and state corruption faults. Thus, Sprinkler is suitable for resource-constrained wireless embedded devices. We evaluate the performance of Sprinkler in terms of the number of packet transmissions and the latency, both in an outdoor and indoor environment. The outdoor evaluation is based on data from project ExScal, which deployed 203 extreme scale stargazer (XSS). Our indoor evaluation is based on an implementation in the Kansei testbed, which houses 210 XSSs whose transmission power is controllable to even low ranges. We compare Sprinkler with the existing reliable data dissemination services, analytically or using simulations also. Our evaluations show that Sprinkler is not only energy efficient as compared to existing schemes, but also has less latency. Further, the energy consumption of nodes and the latency grows linearly as a function of newly added nodes as the network grows larger.