An Efficient and Robust Data Dissemination Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work we consider the important problem of energy balanced data dissemination in wireless sensor networks (WSN), where data are generated by the sensors and must be routed toward a unique sink. Sensors route data by either sending the data directly to the sink or in a multi-hop fashion by delivering the data to a neighboring sensor.We decompose the transmission range of sensors into concentric circular bands rings based on a minimum transmission distance between any pair of sensors. We also propose a data dissemination protocol that exploits the above-mentioned decomposition to meet the specific requirements of a sensing application in terms of trade-off between energy and source-to-sink delay. We prove that the use of sensors nodes, which lie on or closely to the shortest path between a source and a sink, as proxy forwarders in data dissemination from sources to a sink, helps simultaneously balance energy consumption and delay. Furthermore, this protocol is based on stochastic estimation methods and is adaptive to environmental changes.