Efficient Broadcasting in Self-Organizing Sensor Networks

Multi-hop wireless networks (such as ad-hoc or sensor networks) consist in sets of mobile nodes without the support of a pre-existing fixed infrastructure. For scalability purpose, ad-hoc and sensor networks may both need to be organized into clusters and require efficient protocols to perform common global communication patterns like the broadcasting operation. During a broadcasting task, a source node needs to send a same message to all other nodes in the network. Some desired properties of a scalable broadcasting are energy and bandwidth efficiency, i.e., message retransmissions should be minimized. In this article, we present a scalable broadcasting schemes that takes advantages of the clustering structure. In this way, we only build one structure to perform both self-organization and broadcasting in clusters and in the whole network. It appears that our broadcasting scheme presents the best trade-off between the number of retransmissions and transmitters (for energy saving) and reliability, when compared to existing solutions. keywords: sensor, multi-hop, wireless networks, self-organization, broadcasting, clustering, stochastic geometry.