Localized Energy-Aware Broadcast Protocol for Wireless Networks with Directional Antennas

Abstract

We consider broadcast protocols in wireless networks that have limited energy and computation resources. The well-known algorithm, DBIP (Directional Broadcast Incremental Power), which exploits “Incremental Power” philosophy for wireless networks with directional antenna to construct broadcasting tree, provides very good results in terms of energy savings. Unfortunately, its computation is centralized, as the source node needs to know the entire topology of the network. Mobility of nodes or frequent changes in the node activity status (from “active” to “passive” and vice-versa) may cause global changes in topology which must be propagated throughout the network for any centralized solution. This may results in extreme and un-acceptable communication overhead. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a localized energy-efficient broadcast protocol, Localized Directional Broadcast Incremental Power Protocol (LDBIP), which employs distributed location information and computation to construct broadcast trees. In the proposed method, a source node sets up spanning tree with its local neighborhood position information and includes certain hops relay information in packet. Directional antennas are used for transmitting broadcast packet, and the transmission power is adjusted for each transmission to the minimal necessary for reaching the particular neighbor. Relay nodes will consider relay instructions received to compute their own local neighborhood spanning tree and then rebroadcasts. Experimental results verify that this new protocol shows similar performance with DBIP in static wireless networks, and better performance in mobile scenarios.