Randomized gossip protocol in wireless sensor networks with partial sensor involvement

In this paper, we consider a wireless sensor network where only a part of the sensors in the network generate measurement data and have interest in the aggregation output. However, in order to maintain connectivity of the sensors involved in the application, namely application-member sensors, other so called non-application-member sensors, have to participate in the communications to assist in the message exchanges in the network. On the one hand, the application-member sensors have the objective of a fast convergence, i.e., only a small number of communications should be performed until all measurement data are aggregated at application-member sensors. On the other hand, only few non-application-member sensors should participate in the communications and only a small number of communications should be carried out by those who participate in. We propose a refined randomized gossip protocol based on our previous work to address the two mentioned problems. The results show that with the proposed approach the number of involved non-application-member sensors as well as the number of communications performed by the involved non-application-member sensors are both significantly reduced compared to the approach in our previous work.