Leveraging Context-Awareness in Duty-Cycled Broadcast Wireless Sensor Networks

Operating under duty-cycle mode allows wireless sensor networks to prolong their lifetime. However, this working pattern, with the temporary unavailability of nodes, brings challenges to the network design, mainly for a fundamental service like flooding. The challenging task is to authorize sensors to adopt a duty-cycle mode without inflicting any negative impact on the network performances. Context-awareness offers to sensors the ability to adapt their functional behavior according to many contexts in order to cope with network dynamics. In this context, the authors propose an Enhanced-Efficient Context-Aware Multi-hop Broadcast (E-ECAB) protocol, which relies on multi contextual information to optimize resources usage and satisfy the application requirements in a duty-cycled environment. The authors proved that only one transmission is required to achieve the broadcast operation in almost all situations. Simulation results show that E-ECAB achieves a significant improvement compared to previous work in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay without sacrificing energy efficiency.