Good Flood Bed: An Energy-Efficient and Controlled Concurrent Transmission Protocol

Flood-based communication protocols are attractive due to their easy and fast network startup, resiliency to communication or node loss, and node mobility. Concurrent transmissions are flooding-based protocols that enable low-latency, network-wide communication synchronously. They also provide energy-efficient data dissemination with higher delivery reliability over traditional flooding. This paper proposes the Good Flood Bed (GFB) method to reduce further the energy consumption of networks operating based on concurrent transmission by preventing flood in parts of the network where there is no need for flood data. GFB starts with a distributed leader-election process to choose a root node. Then, the root node builds a spanning tree among nodes. The tree establishes a parent-child relationship and forms a new controlled flood bed. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by simulation and experimenting on a BLE5 small-scale test bed. Experiments prove that this method has the potential to cut network energy consumption by 50%.