Efficient mechanism to exchange group membership identities among nodes in wireless sensor networks

It is necessary for nodes in wireless sensor networks to exchange their group membership identities in certain applications such as cluster formation and clone detection. The communication cost associated with exchanging group membership identities is higher especially in a dense network. Existing schemes make use of Bloom filter in exchanging membership information. Although the Bloom filter is an efficient mechanism for exchanging membership information, yet it suffers from higher probability of false positive, that is, a node may be detected to be a member of a group, when it is not. In this study, the authors propose two schemes called transpose bit-pair coding (TBC), and sub-mat coding (SMC) for exchanging group membership information. The proposed schemes do not generate false positive, and have lower communication and storage overhead. The authors have compared TBC and SMC with Bloom filter. Parameters considered for the comparison are: (i) communication overhead in terms of number of bits required to exchange the group membership information and (ii) probability of false positive. It is observed that the communication overhead in TBC and SMC is significantly lower in comparison with Bloom filter and the schemes have no cases of false positive.