Copyright © 2012 Ruiqin Zhao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), broadcasting could allow the nodes to share their data efficiently. Due to the limited energy supply of each sensor node, it has become a crucial issue to minimize energy consumption and maximize the network lifetime in the design of broadcast protocols. In this paper, we propose a Broadcast Algorithm with Least Redundancy (BALR) for WSN. By identifying the optimized number of induced forwarders as 2, BALR establishes a weighted sum model, taking both rebroadcast efficiency and residual energy into consideration, as a new metric to compute the self-delay of the nodes before rebroadcasting. BALR further incorporates both strategies based on distance and coverage degree which means the number of neighbors that have not yet received the broadcast packet, to optimize the rebroadcast node selections. To reveal the performance bounds, rebroadcast ratios in the ideal and worst case are theoretically analyzed, indicating that the rebroadcast ratio of BALR decreases with the increase of node density. BALR can significantly prolong the network lifetime of WSN and is scalable with respect to network size and node density, as demonstrated by simulations.