Wireless Information Sharing in Ubiquitous Environments

We demonstrate the use of ad hoc multi-hop flooding for sharing information among mobile terminals. PDA devices with 802.11 WLAN cards are used as mobile terminals which periodically broadcast position and other presence information. Each terminal relays packets broadcast by neighbors using ayooding algorithm which has been optimized for fast propagation of information over multiple hops. We also report results of systematic experiments using 50 terminals showing characteristic propagation time distributions for up to 5 hops.