Abstract

Advances in micro-sensor and radio technology will enable small but smart sensors to be deployed for a wide range of environmental monitoring applications. In order to constrain communication overhead, dense sensor networks call for new and highly efficient methods for distributing queries to nodes that have observed interesting events in the network. A highly efficient data-centric routing mechanism will offer significant power cost reductions [17], and improve network longevity. Moreover, because of the large amount of system and data redundancy possible, data becomes disassociated from specific node and resides in regions of the network [10][7][8]. This paper describes and evaluates through simulation a scheme we call Rumor Routing, which allows for queries to be delivered to events in the network. Rumor Routing is tunable, and allows for tradeoffs between setup overhead and delivery reliability. It's intended for contexts in which geographic routing criteria are not applicable because a coordinate system is not available or the phenomenon of interest is not geographically correlated.

Citations