Towards minimum-delay and energy-efficient flooding in low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a very important role in realizing Internet of Things (IoT). In many WSN applications, flooding is a fundamental network service for remote network configuration, diagnosis or disseminating code updates. Despite a plethora of research on flooding problem in the literature, there has been very limited research on flooding tree construction in asynchronous low-duty-cycle WSNs. In this paper, we focus our investigation on minimum-delay and energy-efficient flooding tree construction considering the duty-cycle operation and unreliable wireless links. We show the existence of the latency-energy trade-off in flooding. We formulate the problem as a undetermined-delay-constrained minimum spanning tree (UDC-MST) problem, where the delay constraint is known a posteriori. Due to the NP-completeness of the UDC-MST problem, we design a distributed Minimum-Delay Energy-efficient flooding Tree (MDET) algorithm to construct an energy optimal tree with flooding delay bounding. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that MDET achieves a comparable delivery latency with the minimum-delay flooding, and incurs only 10% more transmission cost than the lower bound, which yields a good balance between flooding delay and energy efficiency.