Efficient Broadcasting in Self-organizing Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Multi-hop wireless networks (such as ad-hoc or sensor networks) consist of sets of mobile nodes without the support of a pre-existing fixed infrastructure. For the purpose of scalability, ad-hoc and sensor networks may both need to be organized into clusters and require some protocols to perform common global communication patterns and particularly for broadcasting. In a broadcasting task, a source node needs to send the same message to all the nodes in the network. Some desirable properties of a scalable broadcasting are energy and bandwidth efficiency, i.e., message retransmissions should be minimized. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of the characteristics of a previous clustered structure to extend it to an efficient and scalable broadcasting structure. In this way, we build only one structure for both operations (organizing and broadcasting) by applying a distributed clustering algorithm. Our broadcasting improve the number of retransmissions as compared to existing solutions. keywords: multi-hop wireless networks, self-organization, broadcasting.