Correlated flooding in low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks

Flooding in low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks is very costly due to asynchronous schedules of sensor nodes. To adapt existing flooding-tree-based designs for low-duty-cycle networks, we shall schedule nodes of common parents wake up simultaneously. Traditionally, energy optimality in a designated flooding-tree is achieved by selecting parents with the highest link quality. In this work, we demonstrate that surprisingly more energy can be saved by considering link correlation. Specifically, this work first experimentally verifies the existence of link correlation and mathematically proves that the energy consumption of broadcasting can be reduced by letting nodes with higher correlation receive packets simultaneously. A novel flooding scheme, named Correlated Flooding, is then designed so that nodes with high correlation are assigned to a common sender and their receptions of a broadcasting packet are only acknowledged by a single ACK. This unique feature effectively ameliorates the ACK implosion problem, saving energy on both data packets and ACKs. We evaluate Correlated Flooding with extensive simulations and a testbed implementation with 20 MICAz nodes. We show that Correlated Flooding saves more than 66% energy on ACKs and 15%–50% energy on data packets for most network settings, while having similar performance on flooding delay and reliability.