On Minimum-Energy Broadcasting in All-Wireless Networks

We study the construction of the source-initiated (one-to-all) wireless broadcast tree to minimize the total required power for a given source node, a group of intended destination nodes and a given propagation constant, i.e., the power attenuation constant λ . The Minimum-Energy Broadcasting (MEB) problem has received much attention recently due to the two main challenges of mobile communication: the limited bandwidth of wireless networks and the limited power supply of mobile units. In a limited-bandwidth environment, push-based techniques, i.e., broadcast schemes, appear to be a very effective way to allow mobile units to share the broadcast data on air. In a limited-energy environment, energy-efficient communication architectures and techniques are essential. The MEB problem was presented in [6,7], however, its computational complexity remains unknown. In this paper, we first give an insight analysis on the MEB problem and prove the NPhardness of this problem. We then present an efficient heuristic called Iterative Maximum-Branch Minimization (IMBM) to approximate the construction of the minimum-energy broadcast tree, which fully utilizes the wireless broadcast advantage and demonstrates better performance compared with the related approaches. The experimental results show the benefit, feasibility of the presented techniques.