Trickle: a self-regulating algorithm for code propagation and maintenance in wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Philip Levis;Neil Patel;David Culler;Scott Shenker

  • Affiliations:

  • EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA and Intel Research Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA;EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA and Intel Research Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA and ICSI, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'04 Proceedings of the 1st conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We present Trickle, an algorithm for propagating and maintaining code updates in wireless sensor networks. Borrowing techniques from the epidemic/gossip, scalable multicast, and wireless broadcast literature, Trickle uses a "polite gossip" policy, where motes periodically broadcast a code summary to local neighbors but stay quiet if they have recently heard a summary identical to theirs. When a mote hears an older summary than its own, it broadcasts an update. Instead of flooding a network with packets, the algorithm controls the send rate so each mote hears a small trickle of packets, just enough to stay up to date. We show that with this simple mechanism, Trickle can scale to thousand-fold changes in network density, propagate new code in the order of seconds, and impose a maintenance cost on the order of a few sends an hour.