Data Dissemination Protocols for Reprogramming Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

The wireless sensor network (WSN) is made up of a huge number of programmed sensor nodes spatially scattered to monitor and control environmental conditions. Reprogramming is crucial to upgrade the changes needed and to repair the bugs found in nodes once it is deployed in a hostile situation. Once sensor nodes are deployed then it is not possible to reprogram such nodes manually. Therefore, the sensor nodes are reprogrammed automatically and remotely lacking manual interference. At present several data dissemination protocols have been designed and play important role in dissemination of configuration parameters, program code, queries, commands, bulk data or code packets etc. This paper presents a survey of existing data dissemination protocols employed for reprogramming WSNs and discusses research related issues which provides a broad vision for future research in WSNs domain.