Impact of Variable Transmission Range in All-Wireless Networks

In this paper we focus on the energy optimization based on the incremental exploration of the network. We perform one-hop neighborhood exploration of the neighborhood but the work can be generalized to 2-hop, 3-hop, . . . up to the diameter of the network, which is the minimum number of hops between any two nodes in the network. We propose three distributed algorithms for self-adjusting the transmission range of nodes in a wireless sensor network. The objective is to vary the transmission radii of selective sensor nodes to lower the energy spent in broadcasting or the diameter. Increasing the transmission power to reach more nodes may consume more energy, but lowers the network diameter. Reducing the transmission power (i.e., save energy) without reducing the reachability (in terms of the number of nodes) increases the network diameter. All three algorithms are simulated and compared based on the experimental results.