Approximation Algorithms for Data Broadcast in Wireless Networks

Broadcasting is a fundamental operation in wireless networks and plays an important role in the communication protocol design. In multihop wireless networks, however, interference at a node due to simultaneous transmissions from its neighbors makes it nontrivial to design a minimum-latency broadcast algorithm, which is known to be NP-complete. We present a simple 12-approximation algorithm for the one-to-all broadcast problem that improves all previously known guarantees for this problem. We then consider the all-to-all broadcast problem where each node sends its own message to all other nodes. For the all-to-all broadcast problem, we present two algorithms with approximation ratios of 20 and 34, improving the best result available in the literature. Finally, we report experimental evaluation of our algorithms. Our studies indicate that our algorithms perform much better in practice than the worst-case guarantees provided in the theoretical analysis and achieve up to 37 percent performance improvement over existing schemes.