USEE: A uniform data dissemination and energy efficient protocol for communicating materials

•A new communicating material is proposed using wireless sensor networks (WSN).•New data dissemination protocol for WSN called USEE is developed.•USEE uniformly disseminates the information in the WSN inside the materials.•A simulation study is developed using Castalia/OMNeT++ Tools.•USEE is compared with the most known data dissemination protocols for WSN.

A new Internet of Things area is coming with communicating materials, which are able to provide diverse functionalities to users all along the product lifecycle. As example, it can track its own evolution which leads to gather helpful information. This new paradigm is fulfilled via the integration of specific electronic components into the product material. In this work, ultra-small Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are used for large scale materials such as concrete in smart building. Indeed, storage of lifecycle information and data dissemination in communicating materials are very important issues. Therefore, this paper provides solution for storing data by systematic dissemination through the integrated WSN. It presents USEE, a uniform data storage protocol for large scale communicating material. USEE guarantees that information could be retrieved in each piece of the material by intelligently managing data replication among each neighborhood of the WSN. Unlike related protocols of the literature, USEE considers in the same set uniformity storage in the whole network, the data importance level, and the resource constraints of sensor nodes. When compared with related protocols such as RaWMS, DEEP, and Supple, USEE shows a uniform dissemination and low communication overhead tradeoff for all the data importance levels.