Comparative Evaluation of Information Dissemination Methods for Effective and Efficient Information Sharing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of small nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communication capabilities. Since overlaying multiple service-oriented networks on a WSN wastes bandwidth and energy, we consider all-to-all type information sharing in this paper. Although there have been various proposals of mechanisms to disseminate information among nodes in an efficient and effective manner, their performance has evaluated under specific conditions. In this paper, we conducted comprehensive evaluation of information dissemination methods to clarify their comparative characteristics and the range of application. Through simulation experiments, we showed that tree-based methods could achieve high delivery ratio in a small network, whereas a flooding-based or gossiping-based method was more effective in large-scale and low-density networks.