Impact of small-world topologies on broadcasting for wireless sensor networks

Broadcasting is an important operation and been widely used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These networks are power constrained as nodes operate with limited battery power. Wireless sensor networks are spatial graphs that have much more clustered and much high path-length characteristics. After considering energy efficient broadcasting in such networks, by combining the small-world characteristic of WSNs and the properties of ant algorithm to quickly identify an optimal path, small-world power-aware broadcast algorithm is introduced and evaluated. Given different densities of network, simulation results show that our algorithm significantly improves life of networks and also reduces communication distances and power consumption.