Critical-path aware broadcast scheduling in duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

Message broadcasting is an essential and widely-used operation in multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Minimum latency broadcast scheduling (MLBS) aims to achieve a schedule to broadcast messages with a minimum latency. In duty-cycle networks, a node alternates between active and sleep states, which causes decrease in energy consumption at the cost of increased broadcast latency. An existing scheme mathematically remodels the MLBS problem for duty-cycled WSNs and proposes a vector integration algorithm to solve the problem. In this paper, we propose a broadcast scheduling scheme by first finding critical-paths in a duty-cycled WSN. By scheduling transmissions with a preference of nodes in the critical-path, the proposed scheme reduces the broadcast latency as shown in the simulation results.