Information fusion for data dissemination in self-organizing wireless sensor networks

Data dissemination is a fundamental task in wireless sensor networks. Because of the radios range limitation and energy consumption constraints, sensor data is commonly disseminated in a multihop fashion (flat networks) through a tree topology. However, to the best of our knowledge none of the current solutions worry about the moment when the dissemination topology needs to be rebuilt. This work addresses such problem introducing the use of information fusion mechanisms, where the traffic is handled as a signal that is filtered and translated into evidences that indicate the likelihood of critical failures occurrence. These evidences are combined by a Dempster-Shafer engine to detect the need for a topology reconstruction. Our solution, called Diffuse, is evaluated through a set of simulations. We conclude that information fusion is a promising approach that can improve the performance of dissemination algorithms for wireless sensor networks by avoiding unnecessary traffic.