We investigate the problem of spreading information contents in a wireless ad hoc network with mechanisms embracing the peer-to-peer paradigm. In our vision, information dissemination should satisfy the following requirements: (i) it conforms to a predefined distribution and (ii) it is evenly and fairly carried by all nodes in their turn. In this paper, we observe the dissemination effects when the information moves across nodes according to two well-known mobility models, namely random walk and random direction. Our approach is fully distributed and comes at a very low cost in terms of protocol overhead; in addition, simulation results show that the proposed solution can achieve the aforementioned goals under different network scenarios, provided that a sufficient number of information replicas are injected into the network. This observation calls for a further step: in the realistic case where the user content demand varies over time, we need a content replication drop strategy to adapt the number of information replicas to the changes in the information query rate. We therefore devise a distributed, lightweight scheme that performs efficiently in a variety of scenarios.
While sensor networks are going to be deployed in diverse application specific contexts, one unifying view is to treat them essentially as distributed databases. The simplest mechanism to obtain information from this kind of a database is to flood queries for named data within the network and obtain the relevant responses from sources. However, if the queries are (a) complex, (b) one-shot, and (c) for replicated data, this simple approach can be highly inefficient. In the context of energy-starved sensor networks, alternative strategies need to be examined for such queries. We propose a novel and efficient mechanism for obtaining information in sensor networks which we refer to as ACtive QUery forwarding In sensoR nEtworks (ACQUIRE). The basic principle behind ACQUIRE is to consider the query as an active entity that is forwarded through the network (either randomly or in some directed manner) in search of the solution. ACQUIRE also incorporates a look-ahead parameter d in the following manner: intermediate nodes that handle the active query use information from all nodes within d hops in order to partially resolve the query. When the active query is fully resolved, a completed response is sent directly back to the querying node. We take a mathematical modelling approach in this paper to calculate the energy costs associated with ACQUIRE. The models permit us to characterize analytically the impact of critical parameters, and compare the performance of ACQUIRE with respect to other schemes such as flooding-based querying (FBQ) and expanding ring search (ERS), in terms of energy usage, response latency and storage requirements. We show that with optimal parameter settings, depending on the update frequency, ACQUIRE obtains order of magnitude reduction over FBQ and potentially over 60–75 reduction over ERS (in highly dynamic environments and high query rates) in consumed energy. We show that these energy savings are provided in trade for increased response latency. The mathematical analysis is validated through extensive simulations. � 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. in micro-sensor and radio technology will enable small but smart sensors to be deployed for a wide range of environmental monitoring applications. In order to constrain communication overhead, dense sensor networks call for new and highly efficient methods for distributing queries to nodes that have observed interesting events in the network. A highly efficient data-centric routing mechanism will offer significant power cost reductions (17), and improve network longevity. Moreover, because of the large amount of system and data redundancy possible, data becomes disassociated from specific node and resides in regions of the network (10)(7)(8). This paper describes and evaluates through simulation a scheme we call Rumor Routing, which allows for queries to be delivered to events in the network. Rumor Routing is tunable, and allows for tradeoffs between setup overhead and delivery reliability. It's intended for contexts in which geographic routing criteria are not applicable because a coordinate system is not available or the phenomenon of interest is not geographically correlated.