Reliable Gossip Zone for Real-Time Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

Gossip is a well-known protocol which was proposed to implement broadcast service with a high reliability in an arbitrarily connected network of sensor nodes. The probabilistic techniques employed in gossip have been used to address many challenges which are caused by flooding in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, very little work has yet been done on real-time wireless sensor networks which require not only highly reliable packets reception but also strict time constraint of each packet. Moreover, the unique energy constraining feature of sensor makes existing solutions unsuitable. Combined with unreliable links, redundant messages overhead in real-time wireless sensor networks is a new challenging issue. In this paper, we introduce a Reliable Gossip Zone, a novel fine-tailored mechanism for real-time wireless sensor networks with unreliable wireless links and low packet redundancy. The key idea is the proposed forwarding probability algorithm, which makes forwarding decisions after the realtime flooding zone is set. Evaluation shows that as an oracle broadcast service design, our mechanism achieves significantly less message overhead than traditional flooding and gossip protocols.