Contour-cast: Location-free Data Dissemination and Discovery for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data dissemination and discovery is critical for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks. Most existing research depends on location information that is not always obtained easily, efficiently and accurately. We propose the concept of Contour-cast, a location-free data dissemination and discovery approach for large-scale wireless sensor networks. One important property of Contour-cast is that it does not depend on physical position or accurate localization services. The other advantage is that each node needs not maintain too much topology information. We evaluate Contour-cast thoroughly using metrics including data retrieval success ratio, storage cost, and load balance. Evaluation results show that Contour-cast can reach comparable functionalities and performance as the other approaches with physical location information.