On the construction of energy-efficient broadcast tree with Hitch-hiking in wireless networks

Due to the limited power supplies of a wireless node, energy efficiency is a crucial aspect to the design of a broadcast protocol. In the minimum energy broadcast problem, each node adjusts its transmission power to minimize the total energy consumption. The minimum energy broadcast problem is proved to be NP-Complete. The Hitch-hiking model introduced recently in [M. Agarwal et al., (2004)] takes advantage of the physical layer to combine partial signals containing the same data in order to decode a complete message. Moreover, the wireless multicast advantage (WMA), that is a single transmission can be received by all the nodes that are within the transmission range of a transmitting node, reduces the total energy of the broadcast tree. In this paper, we take advantages of both Hitch-hiking and WMA to design an energy-efficient broadcast tree algorithm with Hitch-hiking (BHH). The simulation results show that BHH reduces the total energy of the broadcast tree greatly.