Although existing flooding protocols can provide efficient and reliable communication in wireless sensor networks on some level, further performance improvement has been hampered by the assumption of link independence, which requires costly acknowledgments (ACKs) from every receiver. Flooding is a network-layer protocol that delivers a message from one node to all the other nodes inside the network. In this paper, we present collective flooding (CF), which exploits the link correlation to achieve flooding reliability using the concept of collective ACKs. CF requires only 1-hop information at each node, making the design highly distributed and scalable with low complexity. We evaluate CF extensively in real-world settings, using three different types of testbeds: a single-hop network with 20 MICAz nodes, a multihop network with 37 nodes, and a linear outdoor network with 48 nodes along a 326-m-long bridge. System evaluation and extensive simulation show that CF achieves the same reliability as state-of-the-art solutions while reducing the total number of packet transmission and the dissemination delay
by 30%–50% and 35%–50%, respectively.