Two energy and time-efficient data dissemination protocols for large-scale wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network (WSN) where positioning information is not assumed or is partially available, efficient data access is a very challenging issue especially in an environment with multiple random sources and sinks. Few years back, an interesting rumor-agent based protocol named rumor routing (RR) was proposed. The key concept RR introduced is that the agents are used to spread request and environmental information in an attempt to not affect the limited bandwidth of WSN. Moreover, in this protocol, the cooperation of agents helps build optimal paths leading to events with low energy cost. In this paper, we first review the major RR extensions classifying them into two categories: location-based and free location-based. Then, based on this classification, we propose two rumor-based data dissemination protocols designed to ensure both energy and time-efficient data access for realistic WSN deployments. The two proposed protocols have been compared with the relevant previous works through simulation campaigns. Performance evaluation results show that our proposed protocols achieve significant improvements in terms of data accessibility, generated traffic, and query latency.