Improvement of Counter-based Broadcasting by Random Assessment Delay Extension for Wireless Sensor Networks

Broadcasting is an elementary operation in wireless multi-hop networks. Flooding is a simple broadcast protocol but it causes serious redundancy, contention and collisions. Probability based methods are promising because they can reduce broadcast messages at the cost of slight additional hardware and without any control. In this paper, the counter-based scheme which is one of the probability based methods is focused on as a broadcast protocol, and the RAD (random assessment delay) extension is proposed to improve the original. The RAD extension can be realized by the almost same hardware as the original, so that the strength of the counter-based scheme is kept. Simulation results showed that the RAD extension can reduce the number of retransmitting nodes by about 10% compared with the original scheme.