Analytical Modeling and Performance Analysis of Flooding in CSMA-Based Wireless Networks

Although different broadcasting techniques are widely deployed in wireless networks, there are limited comprehensive analytical frameworks to evaluate the performance of such schemes. In this paper, based on a rigorous theoretical analysis, upper bounds on the network coverage and the total number of transmissions (corresponding to network energy consumption) of flooding and its popular variant probabilistic flooding are derived. The analysis is performed for a static multihop ad hoc wireless network when the network is in saturated condition. To consider a realistic medium-access control (MAC) layer algorithm, successful signal reception is based on the protocol model, and nodes employ carrier-sense multiple access. Based on the concept of marked point process, two different approaches, i.e., hop based and time based, are proposed. In the hop-based approach, an upper bound on network coverage and energy consumption is derived for any serving policy and queuing delay that broadcasted packets experience. This approach can be easily extended to multiple-source scenarios. The time-based approach is appropriate for the case of known service policy and queuing delay, and it predicts the time-domain behavior of the broadcasting schemes, as well as other mentioned parameters. We show that the two bounds are very close to each other. The first approach has less complexity, whereas the second approach provides a tighter bound. As an interesting result, we analytically demonstrate that the disjoint analysis of MAC and network layers provides a much simpler solution, whereas the obtained results are also upper bounds on the network coverage. Simulation results validate our analytical model and demonstrate its tightness for real scenarios.