Exploiting Concurrency for Efficient Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be successfully applied in a wide range of applications. Efficient data dissemination is a fundamental service which enables many useful high-level functions such as parameter reconfiguration, network reprogramming, etc. Many current data dissemination protocols employ network coding techniques to deal with packet losses. The coding overhead, however, becomes a bottleneck in terms of dissemination delay. We exploit the concurrency potential of sensor nodes and propose MT-Deluge, a multithreaded design of a coding-based data dissemination protocol. By separating the coding and radio operations into two threads and carefully scheduling their executions, MT-Deluge shortens the dissemination delay effectively. An incremental decoding algorithm is employed to further improve MT-Deluge's performance. Experiments with 24 TelosB motes on four representative topologies show that MT-Deluge shortens the dissemination delay by 25.5-48.6 percent compared to a typical data dissemination protocol while keeping the merits of loss resilience.