Broadcasting in Sensor Networks: The Role of Local Information

Abstract— Flooding based strategies are conventionally employed to perform querying and broadcasting in sensor networks. These schemes have low hop-delays of Θ( 1 M(n) ) to reach any node that is a unit distance away, where M(n) is the transmission range of any sensor node. However, in sensor networks with large radio ranges, flooding based broadcasting schemes cause many redundant transmissions leading to a broadcast storm problem. Many approaches have been proposed to mitigate this problem by utilizing broadcast schemes that employ some knowledge of the previous transmissions to reduce the extraneous transmissions. In this paper, we study the role of geographic information and state information (i.e. memory of previous messages or transmissions) in reducing the redundant transmissions in the network. We consider three broadcasting schemes with varying levels of local information where nodes have: (i) no geographic or state information, (ii) coarse geographic information about the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Sundar Subramanian, Sanjay Shakkottai, Ari Arapostathis
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Redundant Transmissions, Sensor Networks, State Information