BDP: A Bloom Filters Based Dissemination Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

There is a growing need for enabling reprogramming in a working sensor network. We prefer to meet the requirements remotely instead of collecting all deployed sensors. Identifying the version difference of data items, having the same key, could significantly reduce the communication overhead, because only those out-of-date items should be updated at each sensor. Previous protocols need to exchange multiple messages to identify a version difference between two items with the same key. In this paper, we propose a reliable and energy efficient data dissemination protocol (BDP) with less propagation delay. BDP uses Bloom filters to identify a version difference between two items with the same key, and find the new one between two items having the same key but different versions. Through comprehensive simulations, we show that BDP outperforms previous work in terms of energy cost and propagation delay of updating new items with high reliability.