Ripple: High-throughput, reliable and energy-efficient network flooding in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The recently proposed Glossy protocol demonstrated the high potential of constructive interference (CI) in improving communication performance in wireless sensor networks. This paper presents a network flooding protocol, Ripple, which also exploits CI while improving Glossy in terms of throughput and energy efficiency by a factor of three each. To this end, we propose to pipeline transmissions on multiple channels. Ripple uses a novel packet-based channel assignment to eliminate the time overhead occurring in traditional node-based channel assignment procedures. Moreover, if we apply the Reed-Solomon (RS) erasure code to Ripple, it pushes the reliability close to 100%, surpassing Glossy, being nonetheless computationally practical for TelosB motes. Still, the throughput after error coding doubles, or even triples that of the state-of-the-art reliable data dissemination protocol Splash. By tuning the transmission interval, Ripple balances between high throughput and high reliability, thus suiting an array of network broadcast applications with various QoS requirements.