Energy-efficient multihop reprogramming for sensor networks

Abstract

Reprogramming of sensor networks is an important and challenging problem, as it is often necessary to reprogram the sensors in place. In this article, we propose MNP, a multihop reprogramming service designed for sensor networks. One of the problems in reprogramming is the issue of message collision. To reduce the problem of collision, we propose a sender selection algorithm that attempts to guarantee that in a given neighborhood there is at most one source transmitting the program at a time. Furthermore, our sender selection is greedy in that it tries to select the sender that is expected to have the most impact. We use pipelining to enable fast data propagation. MNP is energy efficient because it reduces the active radio time of a sensor node by putting the node into “sleep” state when its neighbors are transmitting a segment that is not of interest. We call this type of sleep contention sleep. To further reduce the energy consumption, we add noreq sleep, where sensor node goes to sleep if none of its neighbors is interested in receiving the segment it is advertising. We also introduce an optional init sleep to reduce the energy consumption in the initial phase of reprogramming. Finally, we investigate the performance of MNP in different network settings.