Distributed Broadcast with Minimum Latency in Asynchronous Wireless Sensor Networks under SINR-Based Interference

Abstract

Data broadcast is a fundamental operation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The existence of wireless interference makes it nontrivial to design a minimum-latency broadcast scheme, which is known to be NP-hard. Existing works all assume strict time synchronization and provide centralized TDMA scheduling algorithms. However, WSNs in practice are more likely to be distributed asynchronous systems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of data broadcast with minimum latency for distributed asynchronous WSNs. To this end, we propose a Distributed Asynchronous Broadcast (DAB) algorithm which crucially leverages an elaborately optimized carrier-sensing range together with collision-backoff schemes to coordinate the transmissions among the nodes on a predetermined broadcast backbone. Theoretical analysis shows that DAB is order-optimal and achieves constant factor approximation to the optimal delay. We then conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the practical capability of DAB in asynchronous WSNs and the results corroborate our theoretical analysis.