Hierarchical role-based data dissemination in wireless sensor networks

Data dissemination from multiple sources to mobile sinks is fundamental and challenging in WSN applications due to limited energy supply of sensor nodes and sink mobility. Previous data dissemination protocols either rely on an energy-consuming coordinate system or build an inefficient backbone. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical role-based data dissemination (HRDD) protocol in wireless sensor networks. In HRDD, a small number of sensor nodes are assigned to serve as cluster heads and agents to form the data dissemination backbone and mitigate unnecessary query forwarding. In addition, HRDD designs an efficient data delivery mechanism that provides shorter paths to accelerate data delivery as well as reduce the number of data transmissions. An adaptive backbone maintenance mechanism is also introduced for low-energy cluster heads and agents to reduce their load, thereby prolonging the network lifetime. The experimental results show that HRDD achieves the longer network lifetime, the shorter delay, and the high success ratio compared to the prior work.