A Reliability Aware Flooding Algorithm (RAFA) in wireless multi-hop networks

Flooding is a mechanism that distributes packets to every node of the network. The flooding mechanism is frequently used in many operations in wireless multi-hop networks. Since flooding exploits hop-by-hop broadcasting that suffers from unreliable transmission and fading, it is hard to achieve the reliability in flooding. As unreliable flooding may lead to a coverage hole, it will have a negative effect upon upper layer protocols. In this paper, we introduce a Reliability Aware Flooding Algorithm (RAFA), which estimates the expected reliability using two-hop topology knowledge. The estimated reliability is used for deciding whether or not to retransmit a packet. Using NS-2 [19] simulator, we show that RAFA achieves the higher reliability than RBP [1] by adjusting the number of retransmissions considering the network topology, regardless of the network topologies, the node density or the number of bottlenecks.