Flossiping: a new routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

In this paper we present a new routing protocol, flossiping, for wireless sensor networks. It can be regarded as an enhancement to existing flooding and gossiping approach by using a single branch gossiping with low-probability random selective relaying in order to achieve a better overall performance. By letting each sensor node decide its own activity in the routing procedure, we implement a simple zero-overhead resource-aware routing protocol. It has the advantages of flexibility in delay-power tradeoff, affordability in terms of resource consumptions, and reliability in terms of packet lost-free. Simulation results show that a range of optimal operating points considering delay and power consumption tradeoff can be found with user-customized cost functions.