A Preamble-Based Broadcasting Technique for Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

Broadcasting is a fundamental operation in any wireless networks, more so in wireless ad hoc sensor networks, where each sensor node has limited transmission range as well as battery power. Although broadcasting in wireless ad hoc sensor networks has many advantages but it can cause serious problems like-broadcast storm, which could cause a lot of contention, redundant retransmission, collision and most importantly, drain immense amount of energy from limited battery powered sensor nodes. In this work, our objective is to reduce the number of retransmission and energy consumption of sensor nodes by using the duty cycle property of wireless ad hoc sensor networks. We propose a preamble-based broadcasting technique for wireless ad hoc sensor networks. We show that in dense wireless ad hoc sensor networks a small size preamble can give maximum network-wide data dissemination rather than using the large preamble, which will only consume immense amount of energy during packet reception.