Delay-Constrained and Energy-Balanced broadcasts for low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

Due to the difficulties and importance of multi-hop broadcasts in low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks, we propose a novel Delay-Constrained and Energy-Balanced (DCEB) broadcast protocol. DCEB neither assumes time synchronization for sleep scheduling, which requires all neighboring nodes to wake up at the same time, nor assumes duty-cycled awareness, which makes the protocol difficult to use in low duty-cycled operations. In our DCEB protocol, a distributed algorithm for constructing a broadcast backbone is presented, including its energy-balanced maintenance mechanism. Then, the decision conditions of broadcast forwarding time with or without delay constraint are deduced. Experimental results prove that DCEB reduces much more broadcast cost under the decision conditions and provides better broadcast performance than the Unicast Scheme.