NBA: A novel broadcasting algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Broadcast in radio based wireless networks has been a difficult problem. When a node broadcasts, all nodes within its radio coverage will attempt to relay the message by rebroadcasting, causing excessive radio communication in the region that leads to what so-called broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we present a novel broadcasting algorithm, termed NBA, for wireless sensor networks. It uses two-hop neighborhood information to select a subset of nodes to rebroadcast messages among all nodes in the neighborhood. Each node in the network selects its own set of forwarder neighbors from among its one-hop neighbors. NBA is evaluated against Span, a well-known algorithm from the literature through realistic simulations using TOSSIM. Simulation results demonstrate that under dense deployment, the proposed algorithm performs better.