Stabilization of Flood Sequencing Protocols in Sensor Networks

Flood is a communication primitive that can be used by the base station of a sensor network to send a copy of a message to every sensor in the network. When a sensor receives a flood message, the sensor needs to check whether it has received this message for the first time and so this message is fresh, or it has received the same message earlier and so the message is redundant. In this paper, we discuss a family of four flood sequencing protocols that use sequence numbers to distinguish between fresh and redundant flood messages. These four protocols are: a sequencing free protocol, a linear sequencing protocol, a circular sequencing protocol, and a differentiated sequencing protocol. We analyze the self-stabilization properties of these four flood sequencing protocols. We also compare the performance of these flood sequencing protocols, using simulation, over various settings of sensor networks. We conclude that the differentiated sequencing protocol has better stabilization property and provides better performance than those of the other three protocols.