A mechanism to improve the performance of zone-based broadcasting protocol in the recovery phase

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used in environment monitoring to collect useful information. Packet broadcasting is an essential communication behavior for establishing a communication path from sink node to an interested region of sensor nodes. ZBP is a cellular based broadcast protocol, and it successfully outperformed simple flooding manner broadcasting and common cellular based approach in two main aspects: first it reduced the number of sensor nodes that forward transmission packets and thus save energy consumption; second, it can efficiently avoid collision by properly arranging broadcasting schedule. However it still faces broadcasting failure caused by blank region of sensors. This paper improves ZBP by introducing an energy efficient recovery mechanism which recovers broadcasting when blank region interrupts the request forwarding. Compared with the simple over-network flooding recovery used by ZBP, our proposed protocol can reduce much energy consumption.