Heuristics for 2-coverage multi point relay problem in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

Multi point relay (MPR) selection problem aims at improving energy efficiency by minimizing the number of relay nodes for a network wide broadcast operation in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. If a relay node misses a broadcast packet, a large number of nodes reachable via this relay node may end up missing this broadcast packet. Therefore, improving broadcast reliability in an energy efficient way becomes an interesting task for those broadcast applications that benefit from an increased level of reliability. In this paper, we propose three incremental heuristics to select MPR nodes so as to provide 2-coverage to all 2-hop neighbors of a broadcasting node. Our heuristics are built on our former exact solution to 1-coverage MPR problem. Our simulation based evaluations show that the proposed heuristics can provide very good accuracy level for 2-coverage MPR problem.