Gossiping: Adaptive and Reliable Broadcasting in MANETs

Given the frequent topology changes in Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANET), the choice of appropriate broadcasting techniques is crucial to ensure reliable delivery of messages. The spreading of broadcast messages has a strong similarity with the spreading of infectious diseases. Applying epidemiological models to broadcasting allows an easy evaluation of such strategies depending on the MANET characteristics, e.g., the node density. In this paper, the authors develop an epidemic model for gossiping, which is a flooding-based probabilistic broadcasting technique. They analytically investigate the impact of node density and forwarding probability on the quality of gossiping.