Energy-Efficient Broadcasting Scheme for Smart Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

In smart Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs), sensor nodes usually adopt a programmable technology. These smart devices can obtain new or special functions by reprogramming: they upgrade their soft systems through receiving new version of program codes. If sensor nodes need to be upgraded, the sink node will propagate program code packets to them through "one-to- many" broadcasting, and therefore new capabilities can be obtained, forming the so-called Software Defined Network (SDN). However, due to the high volume of code packet, the constraint energy of sensor node, and the unreliable link quality of wireless network, rapidly broadcasting the code packets to all nodes in network can be a challenge issue. In this paper, a novel Energy-efficient Broadcast scheme with adjustable broadcasting radius is proposed aiming to improve the performance of network upgrade. In our scheme, the nonhotspots sensor nodes take full advantage of their residual energy caused in data collection period to improve the packet reception probability and reduce the broadcasting delay of code packet transmission by enlarging the broadcasting radius, that is, the transmitting power. The theoretical analyses and experimental results show that, compared with previous work, our approach can averagely reduce the Network Upgrade Delay (NUD) by 14.8%-45.2% and simultaneously increase the reliability without harming the lifetime of network.