Localized techniques for broadcasting in wireless sensor networks

• Authors: L. Orecchia;A. Panconesi;C. Petrioli;A. Vitaletti
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 joint workshop on Foundations of mobile computing
• Year: 2004

We present three localized techniques for broadcasting in large scale ad hoc networks, i.e., for the problem of disseminating a message from a source node to all the nodes in the network. Aim of the proposed techniques is to define broadcasting mechanisms that are simple, thus generating low overhead, energy efficient, for deployment in resource-constrained networks, and reliable, in that all the nodes receive the intended message with very high probability. The three schemes follow two different approaches for data dissemination. The first approach relies on the idea of identifying local rules for sparsifying the network topology. The resulting virtual topology is the actual structure through which broadcasting is performed. While techniques for sparsifying the network topology have been proposed before, our solution makes no use of location information. The second approach follows the line of on-line algorithms for the implementation of probabilistic flooding. In this case, the proposed algorithm has been studied analytically, which lead to asymptotic proofs that all nodes are successfully reached by the broadcast message with very high probability. A comparative performance evaluation has been performed via simulations among the three proposed techniques and a previous solution for ad hoc broadcast. We have evaluated various metrics of interests versus different nodes distributions, which include the uniform and a more realistic ``Hill distribution" that takes into consideration certain characteristics of sensor nodes deployment in uneven areas.Our results show that the on-line approach and one of the proposed virtual topology-based solutions offer the desirable compromise between energy saving, network load and reliability.