Efficient regional information dissemination protocol for intermittently connected mobile wireless sensor networks

Regional information dissemination, information delivery to nodes in the region of interest, is a basic and important problem in mobile networks. It has been extensively studied in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, the mechanisms designed for VANETs are not suitable for intermittently connected mobile wireless sensor networks with constraints on available energy, storage space and computation capacity. In this paper, we propose a dissemination protocol for intermittently connected mobile wireless sensor networks, region restricted probability based flooding. This protocol takes advantage of the flooding mechanism to solve the uncertainty of the destinations, uses probability based mechanism to control the growth rate of the number of transmissions in a network, and adopts a restricted flooding mechanism to reduce the cost of unnecessary transmissions. This region restricted probability based flooding can provide, irrespective of the network density, low dissemination latency without consuming more energy than other flooding based mechanisms.