ADB: An Efficient Multihop Broadcast Protocol Based on Asynchronous Duty-Cycling in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of asynchronous duty-cycling in wireless sensor network MAC protocols is common, since it can greatly reduce energy consumption and requires no clock synchronization. However, existing systems using asynchronous duty-cycling do not efficiently support broadcast-based communication that may be used, for example, in route discovery or in network-wide queries or information dissemination. In this paper, the authors present the design and evaluation of ADB (Asynchronous Duty-cycle Broadcasting), a new protocol for efficient multi-hop broadcast in wireless sensor networks using asynchronous duty-cycling. ADB differs from traditional multi-hop broadcast protocols that operate above the MAC layer, in that it is integrated with the MAC layer to exploit information only available at this layer.