Overview of data dissemination strategy in wireless sensor networks

Each sensor node has the capacity of data collection, storage and transmission in the wireless sensor networks. They are usually scattered across the entire monitoring region and coordinate with each other to complete the monitoring task. The wireless sensor network can be regarded as a distributed database system. However, sensor nodes have energy and computational constraints. So some traditional distributed data dissemination schemas face new challenges. According to the characteristics of wireless sensor networks, some design and evaluation criterions are proposed in this paper at first. Then, several main data dissemination strategies are described. Meanwhile their excellences and drawbacks are analyzed and evaluated from several aspects such as energy cost, load balance, robustness and stability. Finally, some conclusions and future research trends are pointed out.