A novel flooding algorithm called priority covering algorithm was proposed for wireless sensor network.In the algorithm

a method of priority covering was used for assigning different forwarding priorities to vicinity nodes so as to make the flooding packet cover the whole network rapidly;a scheme of restrained forwarding and a scheme of dynamic delay for forwarding were used for restraining the redundant flooding packets and reducing the conflicting retransmission overhead.The result of simulation shows that the algorithm is more energy-efficient and low-delay than those similar flooding algorithms proposed.