Dynamic direction control of packet flooding in wireless sensor networks

In large wireless sensor networks, the sensed data transfer is unstable. Packet flooding is an easy and effective way to solve the unstable data transfer. However, it often causes packet collisions by the packets duplicated in the relay nodes. To remedy this situation, we propose a dynamic direction control method of the packet flooding. Using the proposed method, the direction of packet flooding in each sensor node is dynamically controlled, taking into consideration the network traffic around the sensor node. Thus, stable sensed data transfer and collection can be performed without packet collisions. In addition, our method naturally supports multiple sinks, and it contributes to the improvement of packet reachability by transferring duplicated packets to the multiple sinks. After explaining the proposed method in detail, we show some evaluation results. According to the evaluation results, the proposed method can aggregate sensed data sent from the sensor nodes by more than 25% as compared to the ordinary flooding method, and can keep the stable packet transfer rate for a long time.