Directed Diffusion for Wireless Sensor Networking

Abstract—Advances in processor, memory, and radio tech-nology will enable small and cheap nodes capable of sensing, communication, and computation. Networks of such nodes can coordinate to perform distributed sensing of environmental phe-nomena. In this paper, we explore the directed-diffusion paradigm for such coordination. Directed diffusion is data-centric in that all communication is for named data. All nodes in a directed-diffu-sion-based network are application aware. This enables diffusion to achieve energy savings by selecting empirically good paths and by caching and processing data in-network (e.g., data aggrega-tion). We explore and evaluate the use of directed diffusion for a simple remote-surveillance sensor network analytically and experimentally. Our evaluation indicates that directed diffusion can achieve significant energy savings and can outperform ide-alized traditional schemes (e.g., omniscient multicast) under the investigated scenarios. Index Terms—Data aggregation, data-centric routing, dis-tributed sensing, in-network processing, wireless sensor networks. I