Delay-sensitive flooding based on expected path quality in low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

Flooding in low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks suffers from a large transmission delay because a sender has to wait until a receiver becomes active to forward a packet. With the presence of unreliable radio links, the delay performance is even more severely degraded. In this article, we aim to reduce the flooding delay in low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks in relation to link unreliability. The key idea is to build a delay-sensitive flooding tree in which a node receives packet through the shortest path in terms of the total expected number of transmissions. In addition, the algorithm allows multiple senders to send through links outside of the tree if they can provide earlier expected delivery time. To give priorities to potential senders, we employ an energy-balancing mechanism which dynamically distributes the sending role among them. The mechanism not only makes sure senders start to acquire the channel at different times to prevent collisions but also lets them alternatively take turns based on residual energy, in order to lengthen network lifetime. Compared with the best known schemes, the proposed algorithm achieves up to 8% improvement in terms of flooding delay, energy consumption, and network lifetime.