CRBcast: A collaborative rateless scheme for reliable and energy-efficient broadcasting in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a two-phase broadcasting scheme referred as Collaborative Rateless Broadcast (CRBcast). We are particularly interested in reliability and energy efficiency of the broadcasting scheme for multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Our two-phase protocol is based on Probabilistic Broadcasting (PBcast) and an application layer rateless coding. At the first phase, the rateless-encoded packets are broadcasted based on PBcast, in which each node probabilistically relays every new received packet. The second recovery phase, which is based on simple collaborations of nodes, ensures that all nodes can recover original data. We first investigate PBcast analytically and with simulation, since the characteristics of PBcast influence CRBcast. Then, we investigate the effectiveness of CRBcast. We show that CRBcast can provide both reliability and energy efficiency. Simulation results indicate that CRBcast saves at least 72% and 60% energy in comparison with flooding and PBcast, respectively.