Low-Latency Concurrent Broadcast Scheduling in Duty-Cycled Multihop Wireless Networks

Broadcasting is a fundamental networking service where the source node disseminates the message to all the other nodes. Unfortunately, the problem of Minimum Latency Broadcast Scheduling (MLBS) in duty-cycled wireless networks is not well studied. In the existing works, the construction of broadcast tree and the scheduling of transmissions are conducted separately, which may result in a bad-structured broadcast tree and then a large latency is obtained even using the optimal scheduling method. Thus, the MLBS problem in duty-cycled wireless networks without above limitation is investigated in this paper. Firstly, a Two-Step Scheduling algorithm is proposed to construct the broadcast tree and compute a collision-free schedule simultaneously. The proposed method can generate a latency-aware broadcast tree adaptively to reduce the broadcast latency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that can integrate these two kinds of operations together. Additionally, a novel transmission mode, i.e., concurrent broadcasting, is first introduced in wireless networks and several techniques are designed to further improve the broadcast latency. Finally, the theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms in term of latency.