Error Control for Local Broadcasting in Heterogeneous Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Local (single-hop) broadcasting is widely employed in distributed protocols (e.g., neighbor discovery, local information exchange in distributed network optimization and gossip-based algorithms) in wireless ad hoc networks. The performance of local broadcasting is characterized by the mean number of neighbors and the probability distribution of the number of neighbors of a broadcasting node. In this paper, we study the performance of local broadcasting in heterogeneous wireless ad hoc networks in which inter-system interference dominates signal reception quality, considering general fading distributions of both the desired signal and the interfering signals. In addition, we investigate the impacts of different error control techniques (e.g., simple retransmission, Chase combining, and incremental redundancy) on the performance of local broadcasting. The increase in the mean number of neighbors of a broadcasting node with respect to the number of retransmissions of a message is clarified, facilitating QoS provisioning in reliable local broadcasting in interference-limited heterogeneous wireless ad hoc networks.