Practical Exploitation of the Energy-Latency Tradeoff for Sensor Network Broadcast

Abstract

As devices become more reliant on battery power, it is essential to design energy efficient protocols. While there is a vast amount of research into power save protocols for unicast traffic, relatively little attention has been given to broadcast traffic. In previous work, we proposed probability-based broadcast forwarding (PBBF) to address broadcast power save by allowing users to select a desired tradeoff between energy consumption, latency, and reliability. In this paper we extend our previous work in two ways. First, we introduce a new parameter that allows a tradeoff between reliability and packet overhead to give users more options. Second, we implement PBBF on the TinyOS platform to evaluate it beyond the analysis and simulation from our previous work. Our evaluation demonstrates the tradeoffs possible using PBBF on sensor hardware