Predictive Modeling of Network Wide Broadcasting Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks ∗

Network wide broadcasting in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) provides important control and route establishment functionality for a number of unicast and multicast protocols. Simulation is frequently used to assess a broadcast protocol’s performance because the complicated nature of MANETs often makes explicit modeling difficult if not impossible. With application of some simplifying assumptions, however, explicit modeling can be performed. We present models to predict retransmission frequency of three network wide broadcasting protocols using a probability based approach. Our models are able to predict protocol performance within 5% of simulation results when we only consider network layer functionality. ∗This work supported in part by NSF Grants ANI-0073699 and ANI-0208352. †Research group’s URL is http://toilers.mines.edu. ‡Reference for this manuscript: Technical Report MCS-03-05, The Colorado School of Mines, April 2003. 1