GPEB: Power-efficient geographic broadcasting in sensor networks

Nodes in a sensor network, operating on power limited batteries, must save power to minimize the need for battery replacement. In this paper, we study the power efficiency issues related to geographic broadcast protocols in wireless sensor networks. Specifically, we study the problems in existing flooding based and pruning based broadcast algorithm and propose a new geographic power efficient broadcast algorithm to reduce the overlaps of broadcast coverage area and thus the total power consumption. The proposed algorithm is a hybrid protocol that combines broadcasts of maximum transmission radio range and forwards of much smaller transmission radio range. Through simulation, we show that the GPEB protocol proposed in this paper can save total power consumption up to 23% compared to existing geographic broadcast protocols.