Range Adjustment for Broadcast Protocols with a Realistic Radio Transceiver Energy Model in Short-Range Wireless Networks

Broadcasting in short-range wireless ad hoc networks is a key issue. Currently, these networks can be formed not only by computer hosts with full PC functionalities, but also by small communicating objects. Hence energy-efficiency becomes a big challenge for broadcasting protocols. To design an energy-efficient broadcasting protocol, an energy model should be defined to evaluate protocols performances. Nevertheless, all the performance evaluations are based on a one-to-one energy model without taking into account the wireless multicast advantage: such a model is not able to describe correctly the energy consumption in a broadcast. In this paper, we propose to use a more realistic one-to-all energy model to quantify the broadcast cost. By applying this model to the main broadcasting protocols, we will discuss how a range adjustment technique takes effect. We will also show that in a broadcast, a range adjustment provides a trade-off between the number of rebroadcasts and the number of nodes touched by each rebroadcast. It is through this trade-off that a broadcasting protocol can achieve energy-efficiency.