Establishing performance bounds for alternating cooperative broadcasts under high path-loss

This paper addresses the issue of smart network broadcasting using alternating concurrent cooperative transmissions for sensor-based wireless networks that are very lossy. This medium access control (MAC)-free broadcast strategy is a simple, energy-efficient, low-overhead form of cooperative diversity called the opportunistic large array (OLA), and uses a received power-based threshold to define mutually exclusive sets of nodes, such that the union of the sets includes all the nodes in the network or cooperative route during the initial broadcast. This protocol intelligently eliminates the formation of undesirable network coverage holes, a result of the “dead” node resulting from repeated usage. The semi-analytical approach in the paper investigates network life extensions for two extreme continuum network topologies that correspond to the largest and smallest ratios of nodes (or areas) used up during a successful broadcast, namely discs and strips, respectively for γ >; 2. Analyzing the performance of this broadcast strategy for these two contrasting topologies will then set the bounds for arbitrary-shaped static routes or networks for γ >; 2.