Multi-hop Coordination in Gossiping-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Gossiping-based wireless sensor networks provide a communication paradigm with which all sensors in the network can aggregate messages from the entire network without specifying a routing tree and a sink sensor. Random gossiping provides a robust aggregation, however, it also leads to biased aggregation and long aggregation time in terms of the number of communications between sensors. In a previous work, we proposed a scheme to reduce and even eliminate the bias of the aggregation with a smaller number of communications by introducing an indicating header to each message that is communicated in the network. In this paper, we extend our work by a multi-hop coordination of sensors such that when a sensor wakes up in a random gossiping-based sensor network, it can coordinate the message exchange with sensors which are more than one hop away. In order to measure the stability of the network topology, we introduce the failure rate reflecting how often a senor fails to perform message exchange with other sensors. We provide simulation results to show the reduction of the number of communications that are required for every sensor to aggregate all messages of the entire network.