Approaching Optimal Broadcast Efficiency in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

It is an almost classical problem to develop an efficient broadcast mechanism in multi-hop networks. However, the problem is far from solved though a lot of research till recently has been focused on it. In this letter, we analyze the optimal distribution of forwarding nodes that can doubly cover the network with the minimum transmission overlapped area in a multi-hop wireless network where nodes are ideally distributed. On this basis we propose a simple and effective broadcast method to significantly increase the transmission efficiency and deliverability. In this method, the total number of retransmissions is quite low since each node only needs to select three forwarding nodes, and high deliverability can be achieved for the set of forwarding nodes provide nearly double coverage to the whole network. In addition, the method has excellent scalability in large scale networks and highly dynamic environment.