Optimal transmission radii and packet size for Wireless Sensor Networks based on bi-level programming model

Transmission radii and packet size have great impacts on the efficiency of network-wide flooding, which is a crucial operation in the design of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and is frequently used in many applications and network protocols in WSNs. Inappropriate settings of these parameters may cause flooding operations consume excessive energy and network bandwidth and degrade the network performance. To achieve efficient flooding, in this paper, we present an bi-level programming model for WSNs, with the two objectives: First, establish how transmission radii affects the average network settling time, which is defined as the period from the time when the source broadcasts a packet to the time when all the network nodes have retransmitted the packet; Second, derive how the packet size affects energy use efficiency. Analytical and numerical results are given to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed model.