Neighbor-Aware Gossip-Based Broadcasting Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), flooding is usually adopted by broadcast services to disseminate control messages. However, flooding produces an excessive number of unnecessary control packets, markedly increasing overhead. This work proposes a new gossip-based scheme, in which nodes forward control messages with dynamic probability to decrease the number of redundant messages and thereby improve energy efficiency. By using the novel probability table and adjustment mechanism based on neighbor conditions, nodes can obtain a suitable gossip probability. Furthermore, this work considers some special cases of uneven sensor deployment such as that contains nodes with a low degree. An efficient algorithm was also developed to maintain the stability of the proposed protocol. Hence, the proposed approach can deal with various topologies and node failure. Simulations demonstrate that applying the proposed scheme to control messages forwarding improves performance compared with that of existing gossip-based broadcasting schemes.