Information Distribution Techniques in Sensor Networks via Satellite

The reference environment is composed of a sensor network that conveys information towards earth stations (called sinks) that give access to the satellite backbone and, through it, to the destination. The choice of the sink where to convey sensor information may affect the overall communication performance. After introducing the application environment, the paper introduces a method to select the sink that assures the improvement of network performance in terms of energy consumption, load, and total time spent by information packets in the network, considering the fading level measured by earth stations. After selecting the sink, the technique how to propagate information within the sensor network has a main role. The paper compares flooding-based techniques on the basis of the metrics mentioned above.