Neighborhood-Aware Broadcasting in Wireless Multi-Hop Network

The setup of Wireless Multi-Hop Networks (WMHNs) is flexible, fast and cost efficient. WMHNs are used for example in community networks (e.g. Freifunk), home automation (e.g. ZigBee) and are discussed for future telecommunication systems (e.g. 6G). However, the scalability of WMHNs remains challenging. Due to the decentralized nature and the shared medium every communication between the network nodes effects the nodes around. Therefore it is essential to avoid every preventable communication.

Broadcasts are essential for network services including routing protocols that are using them to find routes for unicast messages. Broadcasts in WMHNs can lead to a lot of redundant communication.
Without specialized Broadcast protocols WMHNs can be overloaded - the so called Broadcast Storm Problem: nodes that are forwarding the broadcast message interfere other nodes in the neighborhood that are also forward the broadcast message. Good Broadcast strategies reduce the forwarding of broadcast messages and still reach all or the vast majority of the network nodes.

We developed a Broadcast strategy that uses information of the 2-Hop-Neighborhood topology as well as the information, which node already forwarded the broadcast in the 1-hop-neighborhood. Based on this strategy we develop different variants of Broadcast protocols that reduces the number of nodes that are forwarding the Broadcast message.