Low-Complexity Energy-Efficient Broadcasting in One-Dimensional Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents low-complexity algorithms for energy-efficient broadcasting in linear wireless networks, including optimal, approximate, and distributed solutions, with the distributed method achieving near-optimal performance.

Contribution

It introduces a new low-complexity distributed algorithm for broadcasting in linear networks that performs close to optimal solutions.

Findings

The optimal algorithm has O(N^2) complexity.

The approximate algorithm has O(N) complexity and performs nearly optimally for uniform node distributions.

The distributed algorithm has O(1) complexity and performs almost as well as the optimal solution for uniform distributions.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the transmission range assignment for N wireless nodes located on a line (a linear wireless network) for broadcasting data from one specific node to all the nodes in the network with minimum energy. Our goal is to find a solution that has low complexity and yet performs close to optimal. We propose an algorithm for finding the optimal assignment (which results in the minimum energy consumption) with complexity O(N^2). An approximation algorithm with complexity O(N) is also proposed. It is shown that, for networks with uniformly distributed nodes, the linear-time approximate solution obtained by this algorithm on average performs practically identical to the optimal assignment. Both the optimal and the suboptimal algorithms require the full knowledge of the network topology and are thus centralized. We also propose a distributed algorithm of negligible complexity, i.e., with complexity O(1), which only requires the knowledge of the adjacent neighbors at each wireless node. Our simulations demonstrate that the distributed solution on average performs almost as good as the optimal one for networks with uniformly distributed nodes.