Exploring energy-latency trade-off for broadcast in duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

Broadcast plays an important role and is widely used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Several problems of the broadcast have been intensively addressed in the literature, such as minimizing energy consumption and minimizing broadcast latency. The existing broadcast schedules show that there is a trade off between the energy consumption and the broadcast latency. Finding a broadcast schedule minimizing both the aspects is impossible. The broadcast schedule which minimizes the energy suffers from the high delay time and vice versa. To facilitate seeking a balance between the energy and the latency, the paper proposes a novel concept of criticality which is a combination of lengths of shortest paths and node degree information. The proposed broadcast scheduling scheme enables flexible control toward the quality of a broadcast.