Wireless sensor network-based (WSN-based) applications need an efficient and reliable data dissemination service to facilitate maintenance, management and data distribution tasks. As WSNs nowadays are becoming pervasive and data intensive, bulk data dissemination protocols have been extensively studied recently. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art bulk data dissemination protocols. The large number of papers available in the literature propose various techniques to optimize the dissemination protocols. Different from the existing survey works which separately explores the building blocks of dissemination, our work categorizes the literature according to the optimization purposes: Reliability, Scalability and Transmission/Energy efficiency. By summarizing and reviewing the key insights and techniques, we further discuss on the future directions for each category. Our survey helps unveil three key findings for future direction: (1) The recent advances in wireless communications (e.g., study on cross-technology interference, error estimating codes, constructive interference, capture effect) can be potentially exploited to support further optimization on the reliability and energy efficiency of dissemination protocols; (2) Dissemination in multi-channel, multi-task and opportunistic networks requires more efforts to fully exploit the spatial-temporal network resources to enhance the data propagation; (3) Since many designs incur changes on MAC layer protocols, the co-existence of dissemination with other network protocols is another problem left to be addressed.
Keywords: bulk dissemination protocols; low power; sensor networks; survey.