Novel Broadcast/Multicast Protocols for Dynamic Sensor Networks

In this paper, we have proposed a time efficient, energy saving and robust broadcast/multicast protocol for reconfigurable cluster-based sensor network. In our broadcast protocol, a broadcast can be executed in O(hd² + D²) rounds and each node needs to be awake in O(D²) rounds, where D and d are the degrees of G and the sub-network induced by the network backbone, respectively, and h is the height of the backbone. When k channels are available, the broadcast can be executed in O((hd² + D²)/k) rounds and each. We show that our broadcast protocol can be readily modified to the one for multicast. The cluster-based architecture used in this paper for a sensor network is an improved version. The proposed network architecture is self-constructible and self-reconfigurable by using two topological management operations: node-move-in and node-move-out. Details of the protocol along with experimental results are discussed. Simulation results show that the protocol performance is much better than that in the theoretical analysis.