An Upper Bound on the Performance of Non-Repetitive Flooding over CSMA in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

Although flooding and its variants are widely deployed for broadcasting by different applications, there are limited results on a complete and comprehensive analytical framework describing their behavior in general cases. We have previously published results which provide an upper bound for the performance of flooding when flooded packets have the highest serving priority. In this paper, using a different and simpler approach, we develop an analytical framework for analysis of flooding in general cases where flooding packets do not receive any special priority treatment in the network. The analysis is performed for a static multi-hop ad hoc wireless network using CSMA as its MAC layer. The framework provides an upper bound on the network coverage and energy consumption of flooding and its popular variant, probabilistic flooding for any service time and queuing delay that flooded packets experience. The analytical upper bound is verified by extensive simulations which give evidence of its tightness in real scenarios.