ZBP: a zone-based broadcasting protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in monitoring and collecting information. Packet flooding or broadcasting is an essential function for establishing a communication path from the sink node to a region of sensor nodes. However, flooding operation consumes power and bandwidth resources and raises the packet collision and contention problems, which reduce the success rate of packet transmissions and consume energy. This article proposes an efficient broadcasting protocol to reduce the number of sensor nodes that forward the query request, hence improving the packet delivery rate and saving bandwidth and power consumptions. The sensor node that received the query request dynamically transfers the coordinate system according to the zone-ID of the source node and determines whether it would forward the request or not in a distributed manner. Compared with a traditional flooding operation, experimental results show that the proposed zone-based broadcasting protocol decreases the bandwidth and power consumptions, reduces the packet collisions, and achieves a high success rate of packet broadcasting.