An energy-aware reliable deterministic broadcast protocol for wireless sensor networks

Broadcast is one of the most fundamental services provided by the communication protocol for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we design an energy-aware reliable deterministic broadcast scheduling protocol by using user-irrepressible (UI) protocol sequences. Each user transmits a packet in a time slot if and only if the sequence value is equal to one. A collision occurs if two or more users transmit at the same slot. UI sequences ensure that each user can receive at least one packet error-free from each other within the sequence period. Moreover, it does not require any time synchronization among the users. In the protocol, a new construction of UI sequences is presented and a sleeping mechanism is proposed. Simulation results show that the new protocol has a significant energy saving compared with traditional UI-sequences-based schemes. In addition, the delay can in fact be reduced by employing new UI sequences instead.