Optimal transmission radius for flooding in large scale sensor networks

One of the principal characteristics of large scale wireless sensor networks is their distributed, multi-hop nature. Due to this characteristic, applications such as query propagation rely regularly on network-wide flooding. Besides consuming energy and bandwidth resources, the flooded packet may keep the transmission medium within the network busy for too long, reducing overall network throughput. We analyze the impact of the transmission radius on the average settling time - the time at which all nodes in the network finish transmitting the flooded packet. We show that for large wireless networks there exists a transmission range which minimizes the settling time - corresponding to an optimal tradeoff between reception and contention times.