Efficient Broadcasting in Self-Organizing Sensor Networks

Multi-hop wireless networks (such as ad-hoc or sensor networks) consist of sets of mobile nodes without the support of a pre-existing fixed infrastructure. For scalability purpose, ad-hoc and sensor networks may both need to be organized into clusters and require efficient protocols to perform common global communication patterns like the broadcasting operation. During a broadcasting task, a source node needs to send the same message to all other nodes in the network. Some desired properties of a scalable broadcasting are energy and bandwidth efficiency, i.e., message retransmissions should be minimized. In this article, we present scalable broadcasting schemes that take advantage of the clustering structure. In this way, we only build one structure to perform both self-organization and broadcasting in clusters and in the entire network. It appears that our broadcasting scheme presents the best trade-off between the number of retransmissions and transmitters (for energy saving) and reliability, when compared to existing solutions.