Towards Optimal Broadcast in Wireless Networks

Abstract: Broadcast is a fundamental operation in networks, especially in wireless Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANET). For example, some form of broadcasting is used by all on-demand MANET routing protocols, when there is uncertainty as to the location of the destination node, or for service discovery. Being such a basic operation of the networking protocols, the importance of efficient broadcasting has long been recognized by the networking community. Numerous papers proposed increasingly more efficient implementation of broadcasting, while other studies presented bounds on broadcast performance. In this work, we present a new approach to efficient broadcast in networks with dynamic topologies, such as MANET, and we introduce a new broadcasting algorithm for such networking environments. We evaluate our algorithm, showing that its performance comes remarkably close to the corresponding theoretical performance bounds, even in the presence of packet loss due to, for example, MAC-layer collisions. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other recently proposed schemes, including in various mobility settings.