Minimum-Energy Broadcast Using Practical Directional Antennas in All-Wireless Networks

— Energy-efficient broadcast communication is an important problem in wireless ad hoc networks. Previously, minimum-energy broadcast that exploits the broadcast nature of radio transmission has been studied and shown to be NP-complete for omnidirectional antennas. In this paper, we investigate the minimum-energy broadcast problem under a wide spectrum of directional antenna models, including sectored antennas with fixed sectors and beamwidth and antenna array-based smart antennas with varying degrees of beam orientation and beamwidth. We first propose the RF design and implementation of each model, which suggests the practical parameters of antennas under that model. We then show that the minimum-energy broadcast problem under each of the antenna models is NP-complete. Lastly, we present a heuristic algorithm based on BIP for the above problem under each directional antenna model and experimentally compare the energy efficiency of using different directional antennas using these ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Sabyasachi Roy, Y. Charlie Hu, Dimitrios Peroulis, Xiang-Yang Li
• Keywords: Antennas, Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Minimum-energy Broadcast, Minimum-energy Broadcast Problem