Adaptive techniques for proactive collision avoidance for multi-path data propagation in wireless sensor networks

Data propagation in wireless sensor networks can be performed either by hop-by-hop single transmissions or by multi-path broadcast of data. Although several energy-aware MAC layer protocols exist that operate very well in the case of single point-to-point transmissions, none is especially designed and suitable for multiple broadcast transmissions. The key idea of our protocols is the passive monitoring of local network conditions and the adaptation of the protocol operation accordingly. The main contribution of our adaptive method is to proactively avoid collisions by implicitly and early enough sensing the need for collision avoidance. Using the above ideas, we design, implement and evaluate three different, new strategies for proactive adaptation. We show, through a detailed and extended simulation evaluation, that our parameter-based family of protocols for multi-path data propagation significantly reduce the number of collisions and thus increase the rate of successful message delivery (to above 90%) by achieving satisfactory trade-offs with the average propagation delay. At the same ∗This work has been partially supported by the IST Programme of the European Union under contract number and IST-2004-001907 (DELIS) and the Programme PYTHAGORAS under the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) of Greece. A preliminary version of this work has appeared at “ACM Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Wireless Ad Hoc, Sensor, and Ubiquitous Networks (PEWASUN’04)”.