Fault tolerant optimized broadcast for wireless Ad-Hoc networks

Many broadcasting protocols for ad-hoc wireless networks perform poorly in situations when network becomes unreliable or untrusted. In real environment, any node may suddenly become unavailable due to power failure or mobility, or be unable to receive or forward broadcast packets due to noise/interference. To improve the reliability of broadcasting in an environment with limited trust, a protocol dubbed as multicover dominant pruning (MDP) [2] has been proposed where all nodes cover their 2-hop neighbors multiple times. However, MDP incurs too much redundancy; the same broadcasting task can be achieved with reduced number of packet forwarding. In this paper, we propose three better fault-tolerant heuristics dubbed as multicover total dominant pruning (MTDP), multicover partial dominant pruning (MPDP) and multicover improved dominant pruning (MIDP). All these heuristics not only utilize 2-hop neighborhood information more effectively to reduce redundant transmissions but also significantly improve the reachability of nodes in an unreliable ad-hoc wireless network. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed heuristics. Performance analysis shows that the proposed heuristics outperforms the multicover dominant pruning broadcasting algorithm.