Broadcast Flooding Revisited: Survivability and Latency

This paper addresses the dynamics of broadcast flooding in random wireless ad hoc networks. In particular, we study the subset of nodes covered by a flood as well as timing issues related to the first (latency) and the last time (duration of back-chatter) at which a broadcast is received by a fixed node. Notably, this analysis takes into account the MAC-layer as well as background traffic which both are often neglected in related studies. Assuming a protocol model for the transmission channel which accounts for carrier sensing and interference, we find bounds for the probability of survival of the flood and for its coverage probabilities. Moreover, under certain conditions on the parameters, we establish asymptotical linear bounds on the latency as the distance from the origin of the flood increases and show that the duration of the back-chatter is stochastically bounded. The analytical results are compared to simulation.