TREEFP: A TDMA-based Reliable and Energy Efficient Flooding Protocol for WSNs

Flooding a network with a message from the sink is required for many purposes like synchronization, code dissemination etc. While several flooding schemes exist, only a few are designed to achieve the energy efficiency required by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, we present a TDMA-based Reliable and Energy Efficient Flooding Protocol (TREEFP) for WSNs. Slot assignment in TREEFP is done such that the time taken to flood the network is bounded to a single TDMA frame. TREEFP has a tunable system parameter which brings in tradeoff between reliability, flooding delay and energy consumption because when this parameter changes, the topology of the logical flooding tree also changes. We provide details of simulation experiments to compare TREEFP with other flooding protocols in the literature like FTSP, TDFS and MST. Simulation results show that TREEFP is better than FTSP and TDFS in terms of energy and flooding delay and comparable to MST in terms of those metrics. In terms of reliability, TREEFP is better than MST and comparable to FTSP.