A mediated gossiping mechanism for large-scale sensor networks

Abstract

Gateways in sensor networks are used to relay, aggregate and communicate information from capillary networks to more capable (e.g. IP-based) networks. However Gateway-to-Gateway (G2G) communication to exchange and update information among the gateways in large-scale sensor networks for query processing, data fusion and other similar tasks has been less discussed in recent works. The requirements for large-scale sensor networks such as dynamic topology and update strategies to reduce the overall network load makes G2G communications an important aspect in the network design. In this paper, we introduce a mediated gossip-based G2G communication mechanism. The proposed solution leverages the publish/subscribe approach and uses high-level context assigned to publish/subscribe channels to enable the information discovery and G2G communications. Gateways store/aggregate sensor observation and measurement data according to specific context which is defined based on features such as spatial and temporal attributes, observed phenomena (i.e. feature of interest) and sensor device features. The gateways communicate with each other to exchange data and also to forward related queries for data aggregation in cases that the data should be aggregated from two different sources. The proposed solution also facilitates reliable sensor service provisioning by enabling gateways to communicate and/or forward requests to other gateways when a resource fails or a sensor node becomes unavailable. We compare our results to probabilistic gossiping algorithms and run benchmarks on different dynamic network topologies based on indicators such as number of sent messages and dissemination delay.

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