Expanding Ring Search Energy Analysis and Optimization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Expanding Ring Search (ERS) is an advanced flooding technique exploring for targets progressively. It is widely used to locate destinations or information in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a fundamental problem concerning the best ERS strategy to minimize energy cost in wireless sensor networks is addressed. We propose a model for estimating the average energy cost of ERS strategies, and a model for comparing the energy cost of an ERS strategy with pure flooding. The second model is then used to prove that incremental ERS strategies are inefficient in large-scale wireless sensor networks. Furthermore, we propose an ERS strategy optimization algorithm SSetOpt, which can be applied to both dense wireless sensor networks and sparse ones. The simulation results show that the strategy obtained by SSetOpt can cost 5% less energy than prior works when the network is sparse, say, the average degree is less than 30..