Oppo-Flood: An Energy-Efficient Data Dissemination Protocol for Asynchronous Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a data dissemination protocol for asynchronous duty-cycling wireless sensor networks. In an asynchronous duty-cycling network, each node independently selects its wake-up time. In this environment, data dissemination becomes energy consuming, because broadcasting a packet does reach all neighbors but only the neighbors that are awake at the time. A node can forward its packet to all neighbors by continuously transmitting the packet for a whole wake-up interval, but it leads to high energy consumption and high dissemination delay. The idea proposed in this paper is to use opportunistic forwarding, where each node forwards the packet to a neighbor that wakes up early and receives the packet. Each node forwards the packet, as long as there is a neighboring node that has not received the packet yet. The main benefit of this opportunistic forwarding-based dissemination is that every time a packet is disseminated, it may take a different path to reach the nodes. At the beginning of dissemination, a sender needs to transmit for a very short duration of time because there are plenty of neighboring nodes to receive the packet. As more nodes receive the packet, the transmit duration of the sender becomes longer, thus consuming more energy. Since the order of dissemination is different every time, energy consumption is naturally balanced among the nodes, without explicit measures. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed protocol achieves longer network lifetime and shorter dissemination delay compared to other dissemination protocols in various network environments.