Versatile Support for Efficient Neighborhood Data Sharing

Many applications in wireless sensor networks rely on data from neighboring nodes. However, the effort for developing efficient solutions for sharing data in the neighborhood is often substantial. Therefore, we present a general-purpose algorithm for this task that makes use of the broadcast nature of radio transmission to reduce the number of packets. We have integrated this algorithm into TinyXXL, a programming language extension for data exchange. This combined system offers seamless support both for data exchange among the components of a single node and for efficient neighborhood data sharing. We show that compared to existing solutions, such as Hood, our approach further reduces the work of the application developer and provides greater efficiency.