Scheduling of broadcasts in multihop wireless networks

Broadcast is an important operation in wireless networks. However, broadcasting by naive flooding causes severe contention, collision, and congestion, which is called the broadcast storm problem. Many protocols have been proposed to solve this problem, with some investigations focusing on collision avoidance yet neglecting the reduction of redundant rebroadcasts and broadcasting latency; while other studies have focused on reducing redundant rebroadcasts yet have paid little attention to collision avoidance. Two one-to-all broadcast protocols based on two schemes are proposed herein. The set-covering scheme reduces redundant rebroadcasts, and the independent-transmission-set scheme avoids collisions and reduces latency. Furthermore, an all-to-all broadcast protocol is presented based on the one-to-all protocol. Simulation results show that the novel broadcast protocols are efficient and can achieve high reachability.