A novel gradient approach for efficient data dissemination in wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network, a majority of packet transmissions are delivered in the direction of a sink from scattered sensors. Thus, each sensor node can be implicitly provided with the direction in which to forward sensing data towards the sink. Most existing gradient approaches are based on this observation. However, these approaches do not consider the mobility problem. We propose a new gradient flooding protocol in which only hop count information is utilized as a cost metric for gradient forwarding and each sensor is able to self-adjust this metric with the minimum overhead whenever its movement occurs.