Distributed construction of energy-efficient ad hoc wireless broadcast trees

Abstract

We address the energy-efficient broadcasting problem in ad hoc wireless networks. First we show that finding the minimum energy broadcast tree is NP-complete and develop an approximation algorithm, which computes sub-optimal solutions in polynomial time. We present a distributed algorithm that computes all N possible broadcast trees simultaneously with O(N2) message complexity. We compare our algorithm's performance to the best known centralized algorithm, and show that it constructs trees consuming, on average, only 18% more energy. Finally, we introduce the multiple source broadcasting problem, and explore algorithms that address this problem.