What is Network-Wide Broadcast

Network-wide Broadcast is one of the most fundamental services in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It facilitates sensor nodes to propagate messages across the whole network, serving a wide range of higher-level operations and thus being critical to the overall network design. A distinct feature of WSNs is that many sensor nodes alternate between the active state and the dormant state, so as to conserve energy and extend the lifetime of the network. Unfortunately, the impact of such cycles has been largely ignored in existing network-wide broadcast implementations that adopt the common assumption of all sensor nodes being active all over the whole broadcast process. In this chapter, we first provide a brief survey on previous research works on network-wide broadcast services. We then revisit the network-wide broadcast problem by remodeling it with active/dormant cycles and showing the practical lower bounds for the time and message costs, respectively. We also propose an adaptive algorithm named RBS (Reliable Broadcast Service) for dynamic message forwarding scheduling in this context, which enables a reliable and efficient broadcast service with low delay. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated under diverse network configurations. The results suggest that the proposed solution is close to the lower bounds of both time and forwarding costs, and it well resists to the network size and wireless loss increases.