An efficient network reprogramming protocol for wireless sensor networks

Sensor nodes are often deployed in remote area. It is inevitable to update their codes for introducing new functionality or fixing bugs after the deployment. Network reprogramming provides an ultimate solution to this problem through efficient dissemination that relies upon wireless broadcast. Yet, existing code dissemination protocols for reprogramming Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) become inefficient, in terms of power dissipation or delay, in unreliable broadcast environments. In this paper, we design an Adaptive Code Dissemination Protocol (ACDP) for reprogramming wireless sensor network. The proposed ACDP reduces communication cost without introducing intensive computation or complicated transmission control. More importantly, its load balancing feature is capable of extending the lifetime of the entire sensor network, as well as that of individual sensor. The ACDP is implemented on the TelosB platform in TinyOS. The comparisons are made between ACDP and some existing reprogramming protocols which also use network coding scheme. The results show that ACDP improves the reliability of code dissemination, achieves much better load balance, and reduces the number of packets sent per node. It can save the energy of sensor nodes to prolong the network lifetime.