GCP: gossip-based code propagation for large-scale mobile wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have recently received an increasing interest. They are now expected to be deployed for long periods of time, thus requiring software updates. Updating the software code automatically on a huge number of sensors is a challenging task, especially when all participating sensors are embedded on mobile entities. In this paper, we investigate an approach to automatically update software in mobile sensor-based applications when no localization mechanism is available. We leverage the peer-to-peer cooperation paradigm to achieve a good tradeoff between reliability and scalability of code propagation. More specifically, we present the design and evaluation of GCP (Gossipbased Code Propagation), a distributed software update algorithm for mobile wireless sensor networks. GCP relies on two different mechanisms, piggybacking and forwarding control, to balance the load among sensors without sacrificing on the propagation speed. We compare GCP against traditional dissemination approaches. Simulation results based on both synthetic and realistic workloads show that GCP achieves a good convergence speed while balancing the load evenly between sensors.