On minimum-energy broadcasting in all-wireless networks

We study the construction of the source-initiated (one-to-all) wireless broadcast tree to minimize the total required power for a given source node, a group of intended destination nodes and a given propagation constant, ie, the power attenuation constant /spl lambda/. The minimum energy broadcasting (MEB) problem has received much attention recently due to the two main challenges of mobile communication: the limited bandwidth of wireless networks and the limited power supply of mobile units. In a limited-bandwidth environment, push-based techniques, ie, broadcast schemes, appear to be a very effective way to allow mobile units to share the broadcast data on air. In a limited-energy environment, energy- efficient communication architectures and techniques are essential. We first give an insight analysis on the MEB problem and prove the NP-hardness of this problem. We then present an efficient heuristic called iterative maximum-branch minimization (IMBM) to approximate the construction of the minimum-energy broadcast tree, which fully utilizes the wireless broadcast advantage and demonstrates better performance compared with the related approaches. Due to the power-efficient way of the construction of the broadcast tree, the lifetime of the networks can be maximized.