In wireless sensor networks, due to limited energy, how to disseminate the event data in an energy-efficient way to allow sinks quickly querying and receiving the needed event data is a practical and important issue. Many studies about data dissemination have been proposed. However, most of them are not energy-efficient, especially in large-scale networks. Hence, in this paper the authors proposed an energy-efficient data dissemination scheme in large-scale wireless sensor networks. First, the authors design a data storage method which disseminates only a few amount event data by dividing the network into regions and levels, and thus reducing the energy consumption. Then, the authors develop an efficient sink query forwarding strategy by probability analysis so that a sink can query events easily according to its location to reduce the delay time of querying event data, as well as energy consumption. In addition, a simple and efficient maintenance mechanism is also provided. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms TTDD and LBDD in terms of the energy consumption and control overhead.
