Power of a Defer Timer for the design of broadcasting protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have merged to become one of the most promising applications of wireless ad hoc networks. A defer timer has been used in some of existing network protocols to solve a set of problems in WSNs. We first investigate the use of a defer timer to fully take the advantage of it in WSNs. We demonstrate that by properly setting up the defer timers, many difficult issues in sensor networks, such as power limitation, the broadcast storm problem, and the construction of the virtual backbone, can be easily tackled with only the help of simple localized information at each node. In this paper, we present the power of a defer timer in the design of dominating set construction protocol for broadcasting. The ns 2 computer simulations are carried out for performance study.