The Disciplined Flood Protocol in Sensor Networks

Flood is a communication primitive that can be initiated by the base station of a sensor network to send a copy of some message to every sensor in the network. When a flood of some message is initiated, the message is forwarded by every sensor that receives the message until the sensors decide not to forward the message any more. This uncontrolled flood can cause the forwarded messages to collide with one another, with the result that many sensors in the network do not receive any copy of the flooded message. In this paper, we present a flood protocol, called the disciplined flood protocol, that aims to reduce message collisions, avoids redundant message forwarding, and guarantees the termination of a flood without requiring any sensor to maintain any extra information. The disciplined flood protocol is simple and practical for sensor networks that have limited resources.