Controlled Flooding with Passive Anti-Flooding for Urgent Messages in Body Area Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel routing scheme, named Controlled Flooding with Passive Anti-Flooding (CFPAF), aiming at handling Urgent Messages (UM) efficiently in Body Area Sensor Network (BASN). Due to the low frequency of UMs, most of the existing routing schemes employ common flooding methods for forwarding UMs towards the destination to increase the probability of successful delivery at the expense of consuming greater radio resources. Treating the UMs in a cost-effective way, CFPAF provides a new controlled flooding solution with passive anti-flooding capabilities. In addition, gossip is adopted in CFPAF for further reducing the UM flooding storm. Simulation results show that comparing to the classic Multi-Path Forwarding method, CFPAF dramatically reduces the package numbers without significantly affecting the average end-to-end delay.