An Adaptive Probability Broadcast-Based Data Preservation Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In some harsh environment, wireless sensor networks without the sink are often deployed. In the network, the nodes just have limited energy and are easy to fail. In order to prevent the data loss due to the failure of nodes, each node disseminates its data to be stored at a subset of nodes in the network for preservation. However, each node just knows the information of its neighbors, and just has limited storage space. Therefore, it is a challenge to manage the processes of data dissemination and storage effectively. In this paper, an adaptive probability broadcast-based protocol, named APBDP (Adaptive Probability Broadcast-based Data Preservation), is proposed to tackle the challenge. In APBDP, each node disseminates its data to the network by an adaptive probability broadcast mechanism. The mechanism can not only enable all nodes receive the data packet, but also reduce the redundance of data transmission to conserve the energy of nodes. Moreover, each node stores the data received by using LT (Luby Transform) codes, which are the first rateless erasure codes that are very efficient as the amount of data grows. After above processes are finished, a collector (e.g., a motor vehicle) can recover all data by visiting a small subset of nodes. To the best of our knowledge, APBDP is the first scheme that uses adaptive probability broadcast to achieve the efficient data preservation. Theoretical analyses and simulations show that APBDP can achieve higher performance of data preservation and energy efficiency than existing protocols.