Controlled flooding in wireless ad-hoc networks

We show how flooding can be adopted as a reliable and efficient routing scheme in ad-hoc wireless mobile networks. It turns out that, with the assistance of some tunable heuristics, flooding is not necessarily inferior to sophisticated point-to-point forwarding schemes, at least for some classes of wireless applications. We discuss a reactive broadcast-based ad-hoc routing protocol in which flooding exhibits a tendency to converge to a narrow strip of nodes along the shortest path between source and destination. The width of this strip can be adjusted automatically or by the user, e.g., in response to varying node density and mobility patterns. Finally, we point out a certain deficiency inherent in the IEEE 802.11 family of collision avoidance schemes and show how to fix it to provide better service to broadcast-based routing schemes represented by our variant of controlled flooding.