Duty-Cycle-Aware Broadcast in Wireless Sensor Networks

—Broadcast is one of the most fundamental services in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It facilitates sensor nodes to propagate messages across the whole network, serving a wide range of higher-level operations and thus being critical to the overall network design. A distinct feature of WSNs is that many nodes alternate between active and dormant states, so as to conserve energy and extend the network lifetime. Unfortunately, the impact of such cycles has been largely ignored in existing broadcast implementations that adopt the common assumption of all nodes being active all over the time. In this paper, we revisit the broadcast problem with active/dormant cycles. We show strong evidence that conventional broadcast approaches will suffer from severe performance degradation, and, under low duty-cycles, they could easily fail to cover the whole network in an acceptable timeframe. To this end, we remodel the broadcast problem in this new context, seeking a balance between efficiency an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Feng Wang, Jiangchuan Liu
• Keywords: Broadcast Problem, Communications, Conventional Broadcast Approaches, INFOCOM 2009, Wireless Sensor Networks