Performance Evaluation of Energy-Constrained Broadcast (EconCast) in Wireless Networks

Wireless object tracking applications are gaining popularity and will soon utilize emerging ultra-low-power device-to-device communication. However, severe energy constraints require much more careful accounting of energy usage than what prior art provides. To address these challenges, in [1] we focused on maximizing broadcast throughput between a set of heterogeneous ultra-low-power devices and presented the Energy-Constrained Broadcast (EconCast) protocol. EconCast is a simple asynchronous distributed protocol that can operate in groupput and anyput modes to respectively maximize two alternative throughput measures. In this paper, we evaluate the throughput performance of EconCast numerically and via extensive simulations in various heterogeneous and homogeneous networks. We also evaluate the latency performance of EconCast and compare its throughput-delay tradeoffs when operating in groupput and anyput modes.