Performance analysis of reliable flooding in duty-cycle wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an emerging technology widely applied in modern applications. The resource limitations and the peculiarity of broadcast communication have made traditional flooding methods suffering severe performance degradation if directly applied to duty-cycle WSNs in which each node auto-activates for a brief interval and stays dormant most of time. In this work, a theoretical performance analysis of acknowledgement (ACK)-based and non-acknowledgement (NoACK)-based transmission mechanisms is presented. The evaluation considers both a point-to-point model and a point-to-multipoint one. Furthermore, the opportunistic flooding algorithm, which considers the effects of both duty cycle and unreliable wireless links of WSN, is implemented and evaluated considering both the ACK-based and NoACK-based transmission mechanisms. A solid framework is proposed in order to optimise the flooding in duty-cycle WSNs according to the network requirements. Extensive simulations show that ACK-based and NoACK-based implementations produce a similar performance on the flooding delay, but with significantly different costs on the energy consumption. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.