Data dissemination for wireless sensor networks

Due to the special characteristics (limited battery power limited computing capability, low bandwidth, need to collect sensor data from multiple fixed-location source nodes to a sink node that may be mobile, etc.) of wireless sensor networks, routing algorithms designed for general mobile ad hoc networks may not be directly applicable to wireless sensor networks. In one possible routing scheme for wireless sensor networks, each node maintains up-to-date hop-distances and next-hop nodes to the mobile sink node (or multiple mobile sink nodes). However, this type of method may require too much control overhead in order to maintain up-to-date and consistent hop-distances and next-hop nodes for all of the sensor nodes in the network. Therefore, we propose a new low-control-overhead data dissemination scheme, referred to as pseudo-distance data dissemination, for efficiently disseminating data packets from all sensor nodes to mobile sink nodes in a wireless sensor network.