A combination of wireless multicast advantage and hitch-hiking

In the minimum energy broadcast problem, each node adjusts its transmission power to minimize the total energy consumption while still delivering data to all the nodes in a network. The minimum energy broadcast problem is proved to be NP-complete. The Wireless Multicast Advantage (WMA) is that a single transmission can be received by all the nodes that are within the transmission range of a transmitting node. The Hitch-hiking model introduced recently in [1] takes advantage of the physical layer to combine partial signals containing the same data in order to decode a complete message. In this letter, we take advantage of both WMA and Hitch-hiking to design an energy-efficient broadcast tree algorithm with Hitch-hiking (BHH). The approximation ratio of BHH is within a factor of O(log n) where n is the number of nodes in the network. The simulation results show that BHH reduces the total energy of the broadcast tree greatly.