PROBABILISTIC INFORMATION DISSEMINATION ASPECTS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS LOCATED IN HISTORICAL BUILDINGS Konstantinos Skiadopoulos * , Konstantinos Oikonomou Dept. of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, 49100, Greece kskiado@greenlab.di.ionio.gr, okon@ionio.gr Keywords: Wireless; Sensor; Network; Architecture; Vibrations; Monitoring; Information Dissemination; Abstract. A recent application of wireless sensor networks for monitoring ambient vibrations in historical buildings, has necessitated the need for efficient information dissemination in such environments in order to minimize the effects of the energyvorous wireless transmissions on the system's lifetime. In this paper, flooding is considered as the most suitable information diseemination mechanism, aiming to reduce the number of redundant transmissions for the particular historical buildings deployment. A simple but representative analytical model is introduced and along with simulation results it is possible to estimate the smallest transmission radius for minimizing energy consumption in the particular environment. Introduction Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [1], have been the focus of the wireless networks research communities for more than a decade with numerous applications in a wide area of human activities (e.g., health, science, environment). The nowadays small sizes but of increased computational power, transmission range and battery capacity [2] sensor devices allow for imagining numerous applications and in some sense it is expected that future human activities will always be under the surveillance of such sophisticated systems. Following this trend, historical buildings are the focus of sensor applications regarding monitoring ambient vibrations in order to get estimations with respect to the buildings' conditions. For years the dominating sensor-monitoring technologies were based on wired sensors [3, 4] which can be either difficult (e.g., due to the condition of the building) or forbidden (e.g., due to prohibitive legislation) to install such a system. Technological advances allow for new wireless systems (e.g., [5, 6]) in order to avoid the hazardous installation problems in historical buildings. Depending on the particular architecture and particularly when a wireless ad hoc sensor network is considered as the underlying system, there is an increased need for information dissemination. For example, apart from the ever need data collection process to the sink node, it may be required to synchronize clocks in case there is an absentia of a main control entity, as it is the case in most such system. Under this light, it is essential to avoid redundant transmissions and save as much battery as possible in order to prolong the system's lifetime. In this paper flooding, e.g. [7] with forwarding probability equal to one, is considered as the main dissemination mechanism. The way to avoid redundant transmissons is through the determination of the smallest transmission radius under which the network is connected. Extensive experiments took place by considering sensor deployment as it would be the case in a historical building, the aim being the minimum transmission radius for energy conservation. Following a preliminary analysis and assuming a basic sensor deployment, a minimum value with respect to the previously mentioned radius is obtained which depends on both the volume of the building and the number of deployed sensors. In the following section, useful definitions are given which will be used in the subsequent section of analysis to introduce the basic analytical model. Simulation results are presented in the sequel and the conclusions are drawn at the end of this paper.