An efficient broadcasting scheme for military operations using directional antennas

Most of the existing broadcasting schemes either rely on GPS location or topology information or angle-of-arrival (AoA) calculation or combination of some or all to achieve high reachability. However, these schemes cannot be directly used in battlefield environment due to lack of node location and topology information both of which caused by electronic warfare and random burst mode of communication. This paper proposes an efficient broadcast relaying scheme called Random Directional Broadcasting Relay (RDBR) scheme that greatly reduces the number of forwarding nodes and end-to-end delay while achieving high reachability in medium to high density environments. This is done by selecting a subset of neighboring nodes to relay the packet using directional antennas without relying on node location, network topology and complex angle-of-arrival (AoA) calculations. We evaluate the performance of our proposed RDBR scheme by comparing it against Flooding and Distance-based schemes. Simulation results show that our proposed RDBR scheme achieves high reachability while reducing both end-to-end delay and the number of retransmitting nodes.