Whisper: Fast flooding for low-powerwireless networks

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Martina Brachmann - , RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Kiel University (Author)
  • Olaf Landsiedel - , Chalmers University of Technology (Author)
  • Diana Göhringer - , Chair of Adaptive Dynamic Systems (Author)
  • Silvia Santini - , University of Lugano (Author)

Abstract

This article presentsWhisper, a fast and reliable protocol to flood small amounts of data into a multi-hop network. Whisper makes use of synchronous transmissions, a technique first introduced by the Glossy flooding protocol. In contrast to Glossy,Whisper does not let the radio switch from receive to transmit mode between messages. Instead, it makes nodes continuously transmit identical copies of the message and eliminates the gaps between subsequent transmissions. To this end, Whisper embeds the message to be flooded into a signaling packet that is composed of multiple packlets-where a packlet is a portion of the message payload that mimics the structure of an actual packet. A node must intercept only one of the packlets to detect that there is an ongoing transmission and that it should start forwarding the message. This allows Whisper to speed up the propagation of the flood and, thus, to reduce the overall radio-on time of the nodes. Our evaluation on the FlockLab testbed shows thatWhisper achieves comparable reliability but 2×lower radio-on time than Glossy. We further show that by embedding Whisper in an existing data collection application, we can more than double the lifetime of the network.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number47
Number of pages26
JournalACM transactions on sensor networks
Volume15
Issue number4
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-2571-8441/work/159607535

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Consecutive packet transmissions, Energy-efficient sampling, Low-power wireless networks, Periodic and event-based traffic, Synchronous transmissions