Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks Broadcasting Protocol and Routing Characteristics

The Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) has recently been recognized as an attractive network architecture for wireless communication. Reliable broadcast is an important operation in MANET (e.g., giving orders, searching routes, and notifying important signals). However, using a naive flooding to achieve reliable broadcasting may be very costly, causing a lot of contention, collision, and congestion, to which the authors refer as the broadcast storm problem. A set of metrics for describing these characteristics, for example for characterizing routing scenarios in simulations, analysis, and test bed implementations.