Retransmission and Backoff Strategies for Broadcasting in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

This work proposes new retransmission and backoff strategies for network-wide broadcasting in multi-hop wireless networks. A comparative analysis is presented between existing algorithms as well as the ones proposed herein. Simulation experiments and analysis are used throughout this work to study or demonstrate the properties and performance of specific strategies as well as other properties or results of a more general nature. Several topics not considered in previous work are also studied. The broadcasting strategies are evaluated with respect to their impact on routing protocols that rely on flooding to perform path discovery, and research is conducted in designing schemes that maximize the route lifetime. Different backoff strategies are proposed and their performance is examined.