The Politecast Communication Primitive for Low-Power Wireless

In low-power wireless networks, nodes need to duty cycle their radio transceivers to achieve a long system lifetime. Counter-intuitively, in such networks broadcast becomes expensive in terms of energy and bandwidth since all neighbors must be woken up to receive broadcast messages. We argue that there is a class of traffic for which broadcast is overkill: periodic redundant transmissions of semi-static information that is already known to all neighbors, such as neighbor and router advertisements. Our experiments show that such traffic can account for as much as 20% of the network power consumption. We argue that this calls for a new communication primitive and present politecast, a communication primitive that allows messages to be sent without explicitly waking neighbors up. We have built two systems based on politecast: a low-power wireless mobile toy and a full-scale low-power wireless network deployment in an art gallery and our experimental results show that politecast can provide up to a four-fold lifetime improvement over broadcast.