An adaptive gossip protocol for improving communication performance in wireless sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a set of battery-powered devices (later in short, nodes) equipped with sensing, computing, and communicating capabilities, and it is rapidly integrated with various real-world applications in civil and military environments. Due to the limited amount of battery energy, however, a great deal of research efforts has been devoted on developing energy efficient techniques in the WSNs. In this thesis, we propose an Adaptive Gossip Protocol (AGP) to improve the communication performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet latency, and energy consumption under the energy-constrained WSNs. In the proposed AGP, a node decides whether it should participate in the communication based on a gossiping probability. If the node participates in the communication, it judiciously selects a set of candidate nodes for forwarding. Otherwise, the node decides whether it should sleep based on a sleeping probability. Here, gossiping probability is determined by the number of neighbor nodes but sleeping probability is determined by both the number of neighbor nodes and remaining of battery energy. We build a discrete-event driven simulator using CSIM20 and compare the proposed scheme with conventional flooding and simple gossiping techniques. Extensive performance study shows that the proposed scheme can save the energy consumption up to 12% and reduce the packet latency 5 times in comparison to flooding and gossiping techniques. The proposed scheme also shows the competitive packet delivery ratio, and thus it is a viable approach for WSNs.