Sprinkler: A Reliable and Scalable Data Dissemination Service for Wireless Embedded Devices

We present Sprinkler, a reliable data dissemination service for wireless embedded devices which are constrained in energy, processing speed, and memory. Sprinkler embeds a virtual grid over the network whereby it can locally compute a connected dominating set of the devices so as to avoid redundant transmissions ,and a transmission schedule to avoid collisions. Sprinkler transmits O(1) times the optimum number of packets in O(1) of the optimum latency; its time complexity is O(1). Thus, Sprinkler is suitable for resource-constrained wireless embedded devices. Sprinkler is tolerant to fail-stop and state corruption faults. We evaluate the performance of Sprinkler in terms of the number of packet transmissions and the latency, both in an outdoor and an indoor environment. The outdoor evaluation is based on data from the ExScal project, which deployed 203 extreme scale stargates (XSS), the largest ever IEEE 802.11b peer-to-peer ad hoc network. Our indoor evaluation is based on an implementation in the Kansei testbed , that houses 210 XSSs whose transmission power is controllable to even low ranges. We compare Sprinkler with the existing reliable data dissemination services, analytically or using simulations also.