Broadcast-free collection protocol

  • Authors:

  • Daniele Puccinelli;Silvia Giordano;Marco Zuniga;Pedro José Marrón

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland;University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland;Delft University of Technology;University of Duisburg-Essen

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Asynchronous low-power listening techniques reduce the energy footprint of radio communication by enforcing link layer duty cycling. At the same time, these techniques make broadcast traffic significantly more expensive than unicast traffic. Because broadcast is a key network primitive and is widely used in various protocols, recently several techniques have been proposed to reduce the amount of broadcast activity by merging broadcasts from different protocols. In this paper we focus on collection protocols and investigate the more extreme approach of eliminating broadcast completely. To this end, we design, implement and, evaluate a Broadcast-Free Collection Protocol, BFC. We derive first-order models to quantify the costs of broadcasts, and evaluate the performance of BFC on a public testbed. Compared to the Collection Tree Protocol, the de facto standard for data collection, BFC achieves double-digit percentage improvements on the duty cycles. The specific benefits to individual nodes depend on the relative cost of unicast activity; we show that the nodes that benefit the most are the sink's neighbors, which are crucial for network lifetime extension. Eliminating broadcast also brings several other advantages, including extra flexibility with link layer calibrations and energy savings in the presence of poor connectivity.