A power-preserving broadcast protocol for wireless sensor networks

Broadcast presents a special challenge for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In situations such as time synchronization or routing path establishment, broadcasted messages must be securely transmitted to all nodes, but this process is subject to attack launched by adversaries. For example, an adversary may attempt to waste the battery power of intermediate nodes by forcing a compromised node to repeatedly rebroadcast, thus forming a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. One solution to this problem is to limit the number of message-relaying nodes in the network, thus reduces the energy required to broadcast a message. In this paper, we present a power-preserving broadcast protocol (BOPP) that utilizes a packet reception reliability metric. The reliability score is computed for every communication link in the network. BOPP then selects a set of repeater nodes that most contributes to a broadcast. The selection process is repeated whenever the score distribution changes.