A Decentralized Approach to Minimum-Energy Broadcasting in Static Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is a commonly used feature in wireless networking, e.g. for file distribution, re-tasking, event notification, or miscellaneous maintenance. Due to the limited resources of most wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, minimizing the cost of broadcasts is of utmost importance. This has led to work in the minimum energy broadcasting problem. Solutions to this issue have primarily focused on topology control algorithms or broadcast oriented protocols. Many of these solutions are based on a centralized protocol, where a node has global topology knowledge of the network. However, this information is typically not available in ad hoc applications. Decentralized approaches to this problem have not been able to match the energy efficiency of centralized methods.