Distributed Broadcasting in Wireless Networks under the SINR Model

Abstract: In the advent of large-scale multi-hop wireless technologies, such as MANET, VANET, iThings, it is of utmost importance to devise efficient distributed protocols to maintain network architecture and provide basic communication tools. One of such fundamental communication tasks is broadcast, also known as a 1-to-all communication. We propose several new efficient distributed algorithms and evaluate their time performance both theoretically and by simulations. First randomized algorithm accomplishes broadcast in O(D+log(1/d)) rounds with probability at least 1-d on any uniform-power network of n nodes and diameter D, when equipped with local estimate of network density. Additionally, we evaluate average performance of this protocols by simulations on two classes of generated networks - uniform and social - and compare the results with performance of exponential backoff heuristic. Ours is the first provably efficient and well-scalable distributed solution for the (global) broadcast task. The second randomized protocol developed in this paper does not rely on the estimate of local density, and achieves only slightly higher time performance O((D+log(1/d))log n). Finally, we provide a deterministic algorithm achieving similar time O(D log^2 n), supported by theoretical analysis.