Hypergossiping: A generalized broadcast strategy for mobile ad hoc networks

Broadcasting is a commonly used communication primitive needed by many applications and protocols in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). Unfortunately, most broadcast solutions are tailored to one class of MANETs with respect to node density and node mobility and are unlikely to operate well in other classes. In this paper, we introduce hypergossiping, a novel adaptive broadcast algorithm that combines two strategies. Hypergossiping uses adaptive gossiping to efficiently distribute messages within single network partitions and implements an efficient heuristic to distribute them across partitions. Simulation results in ns-2 show that hypergossiping operates well for a broad range of MANETs with respect to node densities, mobility levels and network loads.