Energy-efficient broadcast scheduling with minimum latency for low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks

For low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks, multihop broadcasting is a challenging problem, since every node has its own working schedules. In this paper, we design a novel broadcasting algorithm, of which key idea is to let some early wake-up nodes postpone their wake-up slots to overhear broadcasting message from its neighbors. This design utilizes the spatiotemporal locality of broadcasting to reduce the number of transmissions. We show that to find the broadcasting schedule with minimal latency and optimized total energy consumption is NP-hard, and then design an approximation algorithm that can guarantee the optimality of broadcasting latency and achieve a polylogarithmic approximation ratio for total energy consumption. Compared with the traditional solution, extensive experimental results show that our algorithm achieves the minimal broadcasting latency while reducing energy consumption significantly.