Disciplined Flood Protocols 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 uncontroled 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 family of flood protocols, called the disciplined flood protocols, that aim to reduce or prevent most message collisions that occur in a regular flood protocol. We show by simulation that whereas a regular flood protocol can cause a flooded message to reach between 60% and 80% of all sensors in the network, a disciplined flood protocol can cause a flooded message to reach between 88% and 99% of all sensors in the network.