Performance Tradeoffs Among Percolation-Based Broadcast Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Broadcast of information in wireless sensor networks is an important operation, e.g., for code updates, queries, membership information, etc. In this paper, we analyze and experimentally compare the performance of vanilla versions of several well-known broadcast mechanisms namely, flooding, site percolation, bond percolation, and modified bond percolation. We carry out our comparison for different network topologies: random, grid, and clustered. Our analysis is performed at the link layer level using a MAC-independent propagation model based on real experiments from the literature. Our main metrics are bandwidth, energy usage, and broadcast latency. Our analytical and experimental results show that, given a desired high reliability for all topologies, flooding and site percolation has the lowest latency; but flooding consumes the most energy per broadcast compared to site percolation. For dense networks, modified bond percolation further lowers energy consumption compared to site percolation, while basic bond percolation leads to a latency increase. For sparse networks, results are similar to a dense network except that site percolation consumes lower energy than modified bond percolation. We briefly discuss implications for different broadcast applications.