Robust Data Dissemination for Wireless Sensor Networks in Hostile Environments

An important research issue in large scale wireless sensor networks is to efficiently deliver data per user requests, which is referred to as data dissemination. This chapter studies data dissemination in wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile environments. In such type of networks, external catastrophic events can damage sensors at a large scale, which may cause data loss or disconnect data transmission paths. This chapter presents a novel data dissemination protocol, RObust dAta Dissemination (ROAD), which can sustain data dissemination when large scale sensor failures occur. In ROAD, events are differentiated based on types. For each type of event, data are replicated to a set of sensors forming a specific geographical trajectory. When facing catastrophic events, since sensors forming a trajectory are unlikely to be damaged simultaneously, surviving sensors can restore the trajectory and resume data dissemination. Simulation results show that ROAD is robust against large scale sensor failures while presenting low communication overhead, high reliability and short response time.