Supporting energy efficient broadcast with unreliable links for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Broadcast is an essential network operation. Designing an energy efficient broadcast becomes an important issue in a wireless sensor network (WSN) because sensor nodes are battery-powered. In a low-duty-cycled WSN with unreliable links, the broadcast problem is challenging because 1) nodes may not be active simultaneously and 2) a transmission may fail to reach all the active nodes. In this paper, we define the least energy consumption broadcast problem, prove it to be NP-hard, and propose a Least-Wake-up-First broadcast scheme (LWF). By reducing the number of forwarders and the number of transmissions, LWF greatly reduces energy consumption while achieving broadcasting. Simulation results verify that LWF improves energy efficiency in duty-cycled WSNs.