CONE: A Connected Dominating Set-Based Flooding Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a significant role in a large number of applications, e.g., healthcare and industry. A WSN typically consists of a large number of sensor nodes which rely on limited power sources in many applications. Therefore, improving the energy efficiency of WSNs becomes a crucial topic in the research community. As a fundamental service in WSNs, network flooding offers the advantages that information can be distributed fast and reliably throughout an entire network. However, network flooding suffers from low energy efficiency due to the large number of redundant transmissions in the network. In this work, we exploit connected dominating sets (CDS) to enhance the energy efficiency of network flooding by reducing the number of transmissions. For this purpose, we propose a connected dominating set-based flooding protocol (CONE). CONE inhibits nodes that are not in the CDS from rebroadcasting packets during the flooding process. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of CONE in both simulations and a real-world testbed, and then we compare CONE to a baseline protocol. Experimental results show that CONE improves the end-to-end reliability and reduces the duty cycle of network flooding in the simulations. Additionally, CONE reduces the average energy consumption in the FlockLab testbed by 15%.