Towards building a systematic methodology of algorithm design of applications of networked sensor systems, we formally define two link-wise communication models, the Collision Free Model (CFM) and the Collision Aware Model (CAM). While CFM provides ease of programming and analysis for high level application functionality, CAM enables more accurate performance analysis and hence more efficient algorithms through cross-layer optimization, at the cost of increased programming and analysis complexity. We use the example of optimizing a probability based broadcasting scheme under CAM to illustrate algorithm optimization. Our analytical results indicate that the optimal broadcast probability for either maximizing the reachability within a given latency constraint or minimizing the latency for a given reachability constraint decreases rapidly with node density.