Localized Broadcast Incremental Power Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

An efficient broadcast protocol is of prime importance in a wireless ad hoc network. The best known algorithm, BIP (Broadcast Incremental Power), constructs a broadcast tree from a source node and offers very good results in terms of energy savings. Unfortunately, its computation is centralized, as the source node needs to know the entire topology of the network to compute the tree. Many localized protocols have been proposed, but none has ever reached the performances of BIP. In this paper, we propose and analyze a localized broadcasting protocol that makes use of the principles of BIP. In our method, each node is aware of the position of all its neighbors within two hops. The source applies the BIP scheme on the set of its two-hops neighbors, and includes in the message the list of its neighbors that need to retransmit, together with the desired transmission radii. Each node that receives the message with the order to relay computes the coverage of its neighborhood based on requested radii and does the same as the source node. Experimental results show that this new protocol has performances very close to other good ones for low densities, and is very energy-efficient for higher densities with performances near as good as BIP