An efficient bi-directional flooding in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Broadcast has been widely used in wireless sensor networks to disseminate information to all reachable nodes. The simplest way of realizing broadcast is via omnidirectional flooding. However, it generates an excessive amount of redundant traffic and exaggerates interference in the shared medium among the neighboring nodes. In order to mitigate these problems, this paper proposes an efficient flooding scheme with directional antennas, called BDF (Bi-Directional Flooding). The BDF scheme limits the propagation range of the packet forwarding to two directions over four, in order to minimize an overlapped area due to omnidirectional flooding. To analyze its performance, BDF has been compared with omnidirectional flooding and NEDF schemes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.