Location-aided flooding: an energy-efficient data dissemination protocol for wireless-sensor networks

We present a new information dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks. This protocol uses location information to reduce redundant transmissions, thereby saving energy. The sensor network is divided into virtual grids and each sensor node associates itself with a virtual grid based on its location. Sensor nodes within a virtual grid are classified as either gateway nodes or internal nodes. While gateway nodes are responsible for forwarding the data across virtual grids, internal nodes forward the data within a virtual grid. The proposed approach, termed location-aided flooding (LAF), achieves energy savings by reducing the redundant transmissions of the same packet by a node. We study the performance of LAF for different grid sizes and different node densities and compare it to other well-known methods. We show that LAF can save a significant amount of energy compared to prior methods.