EDFS a novel flooding protocol for multi-hop wireless networks

In this paper, we present a novel tree propagation mechanism, called "Extended Depth First Search" (EDFS) to efficiently do the flooding of broadcast messages in multi-hop wireless networks. Relying on a tree structure is a simple and efficient way to elect relay nodes and thus reduce the number of redundant re-transmissions. We discuss the principle and functioning of EDFS and propose both, a centralized and distributed algorithm to elect relay nodes in wireless environments. We also analyze the performance of the proposed technique and show that the distributed algorithm performs as well as the centralized. Finally, we present some simulation results to show the performance of EDFS compared, to other flooding techniques.