Exploiting the capture effect for low-latency flooding in wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present the Flash flooding protocol that exploits the capture effect to produce low-latency network floods. The capture effect is the ability of some radios to correctly receive one of several concurrently transmitted messages, even if the received strengths of the two messages are almost the same. We exploit this phenomenon in a network flooding scenario by allowing nodes to propagate the flooding message concurrently, thus reducing delays due to neighborhood contention. Our experimental results indicate that Flash can reduce latency by 75-80 percent without sacrificing flooding reliability or coverage.

REFERENCES

• 1: Joseph Polastre , Jason Hill , David Culler, Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 03-05, 2004, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1031495.1031508]
• 2: Michael Buettner , Gary V. Yee , Eric Anderson , Richard Han, X-MAC: a short preamble MAC protocol for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182838]
• 3: K. Leentvaar and J. Flint. The Capture Effect in FM Receivers. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 24(5):531--539, 1976.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
capture effect, flooding, latency, wireless sensor networks