RoCoCo: Receiver-Initiated Opportunistic Data Collection and Command Multicasting for WSNs

Many data collection protocols have been proposed to cater for the energy-efficient flow of sensor data from distributed sources to a sink node. However, the transmission of control commands from the sink to one or only a small set of nodes in the network is generally unsupported by these protocols. Supplementary protocols for packet routing and data dissemination have been developed to this end, although their energy requirements commonly thwart the low-power nature of data collection protocols. We tackle this challenge by presenting RoCoCo in this paper. It combines data collection and dissemination by extending the low-energy ORiNoCo collection protocol by means to reconfigure subsets of nodes during runtime. Synergistically leveraging existing message types, RoCoCo allows for the definition of multicast recipient groups and forwards commands to these groups in an opportunistic fashion. Relying on Bloom filters to define the recipient addresses, RoCoCo only incurs small memory and energy overheads. We confirm its feasibility by evaluating the introduced delays, command success rates, and its energy overhead in comparison to existing collection/dissemination protocols.