Efficient Broadcasting in Tactical Networks: The Impact of Local Topology Information Accuracy

Broadcasting (communicating information from one to all or many to all nodes in a network) is an important communication primitive in tactical networks. To reduce the spectral cost of such protocols, instead of using simple flooding, many proposed broadcast protocols such as the Simplified Multicast Forwarding (SMF) employ the local topology information to reduce the number of packet rebroadcasts. The performance of such optimizations depends on the accuracy of the topology information. In this work, we explore how well SMF functions in the presence of inaccurate local topology information due to mobility and the probabilistic nature of wireless transmissions. Our results show that SMF performs very poorly when these effects combine. The typical extensions of QoS improvements for SMF are found to incur significantly higher protocol overheads and can only partially enhance its delivery ratio.