Efficient Broadcasting in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Network-wide broadcasting is a fundamental and frequently invoked communication primitive in wireless ad hoc networks where there are no pre-existing communication infrastructures. Existing broadcasting techniques perform well with respect to two out of the three performance goals (low broadcast latency, low retransmission overhead, and high broadcast reachability), but require each host to track its neighbors within at least 2-hop distance away. This paper introduces a new broadcasting scheme called Adaptive Scheduling with Adaptive assessment Periods (ASAP) and its variants that achieve the three performance goals simultaneously while requiring each host to track only its one-hop neighbors. In particular, the ASAP schemes offer low broadcast latency, making them suitable for time-constrained applications such as broadcasts of emergency messages and multimedia applications.