Topology-Transparent Distributed Multicast and Broadcast Scheduling in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Transmission scheduling is a key problem in mobile ad hoc networks. Many transmission scheduling algorithms have been proposed to maximize the spatial reuse and minimize the time-division multiple-access (TDMA) frame length in mobile ad hoc networks. Most algorithms are dependent on the exact network topology and cannot adapt to the dynamic topology in a mobile wireless network. To overcome this limitation, several topology-transparent scheduling algorithms have been proposed. The slots are assigned to guarantee that there is at least one collision-free time slot in each frame. In this paper, we consider multicast and broadcast, and propose a novel topology-transparent distributed scheduling algorithm. Instead of guaranteeing at least one collision-free transmission, the proposed algorithm guarantees one successful transmission exceeding a given probability, and achieves a much better average throughput. The simulation results show that the performance of our proposed algorithm is much better than the conventional TDMA and other existing algorithms in most cases.