Energy-Efficient Broadcasting in All-Wireless Networks

In all-wireless networks, minimizing energy consumption is crucial as in most cases the nodes are battery-operated. We focus on the problem of power-optimal broadcast, for which it is well known that the broadcast nature of radio transmissions can be exploited to optimize energy consumption. This problem appears to be difficult to solve [30]. We provide a formal proof of NP-completeness for the general case and give an NP-completeness result for the geometric case; in the former, the network topology is represented by a generic graph with arbitrary weights, whereas in the latter a Euclidean distance is considered. For the general case, we show that it cannot be approximated better than O(logN), where N is the total number of nodes. We then describe an approximation algorithm that achieves the O(logN) approximation ratio. We also describe a new heuristic, Embedded Wireless Multicast Advantage. We show that it compares well with other proposals and we explain how it can be distributed.