A Bloom filters based dissemination protocol in wireless sensor networks

There is a growing need for enabling reprogramming a working sensor network in unattended area. We prefer to meet the requirements remotely by disseminating parameters instead of collecting all deployed sensors. Identifying the version differences of parameters on different sensor nodes can significantly reduce the communication overhead, because only those out-of-date ones need to be updated. In this paper, we propose BDP, a Bloom filter based data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks. Using Bloom filters as compact storage of the version information of data items, BDP efficiently identifies the version differences among data items with the same key and guarantees network-wide consistency with high reliability. Testbed experiment and simulation results demonstrate that BDP outperforms the existing schemes with low energy cost, short propagation delay of updating new items, and high reliability. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.