ECHO: Efficient Zero-Control Network-Wide Broadcast for Mobile Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Network-wide broadcasting is a key requirement in military networks for supporting applications such as situation awareness and emergency messages. Current methods are based on flooding, or use control packets which limits scalability. We present a novel protocol called ECHO that constructs and maintains a broadcast backbone without using any control packets. Instead, using a field in the data packet header, a node listens for an “echo” of the specific packet that it transmitted to determine its membership in the backbone. ECHO is deterministic, source-independent, fully distributed, accommodates mobility, and balances battery consumption across nodes. We prove the correctness of ECHO and show that its communication complexity is O(N) lower than that of Flooding and Multi-Point Relay (MPR) in dense networks. Simulations over random mobile networks show that ECHO uses 2.5x-9x fewer transmissions than Flooding to achieve similar delivery ratio. Experiments on a 12-node testbed of goTenna mobile mesh networking devices show that ECHO reduces transmissions by 3x, and increases battery life by >2x over Flooding. ECHO's performance advantages are crucial for scalable broadcast in low-power, low-capacity military multi-hop wireless networks.