Pseudo geometric broadcast protocols in wireless sensor networks: Design, evaluation, and analysis

With increasingly popular wireless and low-power sensors/devices, broadcast is one of essential operations to enhance information accessibility and availability. Due to the lack of centralized coordination and limited resources, however, designing an efficient broadcast protocol is challenging in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Although on-board Global Positioning System (GPS) based broadcast protocols that heavily rely on the geographical information and its accuracy have been proposed, the positional inaccuracy and non-negligible deployment cost may become an issue. Thus, we investigate a pseudo geometric broadcast problem and propose its corresponding protocols, called pseudo geometric broadcast protocols, in resource constrained WSNs: (i) Approximating Neighbor Nodes based Broadcast Protocol (Approx), (ii) Enhanced Ad Hoc Broadcast Protocol (AHBP) with Target Forwarding Nodes (EBP(|Nf|)), and (iii) Node Distribution Sensitive Broadcast (NDS). The basic idea is that a packet sender approximates the locations of its neighbor nodes and searches a set of forwarding nodes located close to the strategic positions without the support of GPS in a heuristic manner. We develop a customized discrete-event driven simulator using OMNeT++ to conduct our experiments by varying the key simulation parameters, and analyze the performance of broadcast protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, number of broadcasts, propagation delay, and computational overhead. Extensive simulation results indicate that the proposed broadcast protocols achieve competitive performance and become viable approaches in WSNs.