An Energy-efficient Broadcast Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Compared with fixed networks, broadcasting from base station to nodes is very important for the wireless networks in the cases such as distributing secure keys in the network or delivering control commands to nodes. However, the sparse distribution and limited resource of nodes bring difficulties to the efficient broadcast in wireless sensor networks. An energy-efficient broadcast control protocol is proposed to build a limited-node broadcast tree so that the broadcast storm can be relieved and the network lifetime can be prolonged. Firstly, through the wave of neighbor discovery packets, each node learns its one-hop neighbor. In order to reduce the retransmission numbers and energy overhead, a well-designed forwarder selection protocol is proposed based on the node coverage and neighbor number in the construction of broadcast tree. Furthermore, a tree pruning algorithm is designed to decrease the duplicate coverage. Simulation results show the protocol can save significant energy over flooding without sacrificing the coverage and reachability.