  Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have recently received an increasing interest.
They are now expected to be deployed for long periods of time, thus requiring
software updates. Updating the software code automatically on a huge number of
sensors is a tremendous task, as ''by hand'' updates can obviously not be
considered, especially when all participating sensors are embedded on mobile
entities. In this paper, we investigate an approach to automatically update
software in mobile sensor-based application when no localization mechanism is
available. We leverage the peer-to-peer cooperation paradigm to achieve a good
trade-off between reliability and scalability of code propagation. More
specifically, we present the design and evaluation of GCP ({\emph Gossip-based
Code Propagation}), a distributed software update algorithm for mobile wireless
sensor networks. GCP relies on two different mechanisms (piggy-backing and
forwarding control) to improve significantly the load balance without
sacrificing on the propagation speed. We compare GCP against traditional
dissemination approaches. Simulation results based on both synthetic and
realistic workloads show that GCP achieves a good convergence speed while
balancing the load evenly between sensors.
