Minimum-energy broadcast in all-wireless networks: NP-completeness and distribution issues

In all-wireless networks a crucial problem is to minimize energy consumption, as in most cases the nodes are battery-operated. We focus on the problem of power-optimal broadcast, for which it is well known that the broadcast nature of the radio transmission can be exploited to optimize energy consumption. Several authors have conjectured that the problem of power-optimal broadcast is NP-complete. We provide here a formal proof, both for the general case and for the geometric one; in the former case, the network topology is represented by a generic graph with arbitrary weights, whereas in the latter a Euclidean distance is considered. We then describe a new heuristic, Embedded Wireless Multicast Advantage. We show that it compares well with other proposals and we explain how it can be distributed.