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Advances in processor, memory, and radio technology enable small and cheap nodes capable of sensing, communication, and computation. Networks of such nodes can coordinate to perform distributed sensing of environmental phenomena. We explore the directed diffusion paradigm for such coordination. Directed diffusion is data-centric in that all communication is for named data. All nodes in a directed-diffusion-based network are application aware. This enables diffusion to achieve energy savings by selecting empirically good paths and by caching and processing data in-network (e.g., data aggregation). We explore and evaluate the use of directed diffusion for a simple remote-surveillance sensor network analytically and experimentally. Our evaluation indicates that directed diffusion can achieve significant energy savings and can outperform idealized traditional schemes (e.g., omniscient multicast) under the investigated scenarios.
Intanagonwiwat et al. (Sat,) studied this question.