Flooding Zone Initialization Protocol (FZIP): Enabling efficient multimedia diffusion for multi-hop wireless networks

Flooding protocols have shown to be failure resilient and robust in transporting data over multi-hop wireless networks, e.g. wireless sensor networks and ad hoc networks. However, flooding protocols are considered to be less efficient in power consumption compared to unicast based protocols. In this paper, we present our Flooding Zone Initialization Protocol (FZIP) which constrains the flooding storm in a carefully selected set of intermediate nodes between the session endpoints. The use of flooding protocols in the constructed zone reduces power expenditure as well as packet loss compared to unrestricted flooding zone. We validate FZIP for diffusing multimedia flows using the NS2 simulator in comparison with flooding without FZIP and using end-to-end UDP. FZIP shows better results in terms of packet delivery and power consumption, especially in large scale multi-hop scenarios with high error rates.