Poster Abstract: Using Adaptive Range Control to Optimize 1-Hop Broadcast Coverage in Dense Wireless Networks∗

As technology trends continue to reduce the size, power consumption and cost of embedded networked sensors, they are rapidly approaching the small size and low cost necessary to allow a much wider range of novel usage. The resulting tremendous growth in sensor networks applications predicates increases in both scale and density for their wireless networks. Our initial measurements of an active tagging application, i.e., representing the state of everyday objects, within a common indoor environment shows that the average degree of such a network could easily range up to several hundred. In addition, the variance of object density is quite high, ranging by 2 orders of magnitude from 1 to over 100/m. The characteristics of future sensor networks large scale, high densities and large variances compounded with the fundamental broadcast nature of wireless networks poses a challenge for these systems: how to manage channel capacity to ensure good performance. Our work [2], in particular, considers the problem of how nodes within such dense networks can maximize the number of 1-hop receivers of a broadcast message, which we call the broadcast coverage problem. We choose broadcast coverage as a metric because broad classes of routing, localization and discovery protocols rely on periodic or aperiodic single hop broadcasts, and coverage is an important metric for such ∗This work was supported in part by NSF grant EIA-9986046 and DARPA contract N66001-00-1-8953.