Abstract: Flooding is a fundamental methodology in wireless sensor networks. Applications such as topology formation, route establishment, target detection or data query often use the flooding strategy to provide the solution. Most of previous research on efficient flooding strategics focuses on producing an optimal broadcast tree, with assumption that communications between all nodes are reliable. However, for real-world wireless sensor networks, this aim as well as the assumption may be inefficient This paper proposed an efficient flooding protocol-Optimal Search Flooding Protocol (OSFP) for applications such as target detection in sensor networks. We took advantage of the clustering methodology and optimal search theory in the OSFP to achieve good performance. Our OSFP can be applied not only to the perfect data transmission network, but also to imperfect data transmission network. Simulations show OSFP can find out the target with a maximum probability and does not increase the search cost compared with other flooding protocols.

Key words: Target detection, Optimal search theory, Flooding protocol, Clustering, WSN