Broadcast capacity of a WSN employing power control and limited range dissemination

The broadcast capacity of a wireless sensor network (WSN) is defined as the maximum rate at which the network may generate messages intended for distribution to the entire network subject to coverage and delay constraints. Broadcast capacity depends on factors such as topology, collisions, node failures and queueing delays that may be incurred during heavy load conditions. In our previous work, we studied the improvements in efficiency and collision reduction through the use of information coordination (IC) and communication coordination (CC) respectively. In this paper we extend our work in three aspects: (i) we look at a more realistic topology for sensor networks, a Poisson cluster process, (ii) we allow for variable transmission distances as an abstraction of power control, and (iii) messages have a limited dissemination range, implying that each message may only permeate up to a certain distance r from its originator. We quantify the additional improvement in broadcast capacity when power control is added to IC and CC. We also show that broadcast capacity greatly increases when the reach of the message is restricted irrespective of whether IC and/or CC are employed, however the penalty incurred is reduced coverage.