Performance evaluation of reliable overlay multicast in wireless sensor networks

Using multicast communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an efficient way to disseminate code updates to multiple sensor nodes. For this purpose a multicast protocol has to support bulky traffic (typical traffic pattern for code updates) and end-to-end reliability. In addition, we are interested in energy-efficient operations due to the limited resources of WSNs. Currently no data dissemination scheme fits the requirements mentioned above. Therefore, we proposed the SNOMC (Sensor Node Overlay Multicast) protocol, an overlay multicast protocol, which supports reliable, time-efficient, and energy-efficient data dissemination of bulky data from one sender to many receivers. The protocol's performance in terms of transmission time, number of totally transmitted packets and energy consumption is compared to other often cited data dissemination protocols. Our results show superior performance of SNOMC independent of the underlaying MAC protocol.