1 Sprinkler: A Reliable and Scalable Data Dissemination Service for Wireless Embedded Devices Vinayak Naik 1 Anish Arora 1 Prasun Sinha 1 naik@cse.ohio-state.edu anish@cse.ohio-state.edu prasun@cse.ohio-state.edu Hongwei Zhang 1 zhangho@cse.ohio-state.edu 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering The Ohio State University Columbus, OH - 43210 June 2, 2005 Abstract We present Sprinkler, a reliable data dissemination service for wireless embedded devices which are constrained in energy, processing speed, and memory. Sprinkler embeds a virtual grid over the network whereby it can locally compute a connected dominating set of the devices so as to avoid redundant transmissions ,and a transmission schedule to avoid collisions. Sprinkler transmits O(1) times the optimum number of packets in O(1) of the optimum latency; its time complexity is O(1). Thus, Sprinkler is suitable for resource-constrained wireless embedded devices. Sprinkler is tolerant to fail-stop and state corruption faults. We evaluate the performance of Sprinkler in terms of the number of packet transmissions and the latency, both in an outdoor and an indoor environment. The outdoor evaluation is based on data from the ExScal project, which deployed 203 extreme scale stargates (XSS), the largest ever IEEE 802.11b peer-to-peer ad hoc network. Our indoor evaluation is based on an implementation in the Kansei testbed , that houses 210 XSSs whose transmission power is controllable to even low ranges. We compare Sprinkler with the existing reliable data dissemination services, analytically or using simulations also. I. I NTRODUCTION ExScal [2] stands for Extreme Scaling. ExScal was designed to use 10000 sensor nodes spread over a length of 10Km. The application of ExScal is to provide detection, classification, and tracking of an intruder. The objective of ExScal is to scale the low cost, power efficiency, robustness, accuracy, ease of deployment, and self configurability properties of ad hoc wireless network. The latency and reliability provided by the sensor network do not satisfy the real time requirements of ExScal application. Hence, a backbone ad hoc network of 802.11 battery powered 203 XSSs was laid over the sensor network. Reprogramming in the field has emerged as a necessary primitive for wireless devices. There are many reasons for this, for instance, resulting from an incomplete knowledge of the deployment environment, planned phases of operation that are instrumented only at runtime, or evolution of the operational requirements. In project ExScal [2] reprogramming was used to change programs on sensor nodes depending upon the tasks requirement such as environment calibration using sensors, localization of nodes, and broadcast of locations etc. For XSS devices, reprogramming was used This work was sponsored by DARPA NEST contract OSU-RF program F33615-01-C-1901. Intel sponsored 225 stargates.