Delay Analysis of Broadcast Routing in Packet-Switching Networks

Broadcast addressing is the capability to send a packet from a source node to all other nodes in the network. Store-and-forward, packet-switching networks are not inherently designed to carry broadcast packets, and broadcasting has to be implemented by some sort of routing algorithm. In this paper, the source based forwarding algorithm is considered. With this algorithm, a spanning tree is defined for each node, and broadcast packets are sent along the branches of these trees. Approximation methods are presented to obtain a lower bound and estimates of the mean broadcast time. The accuracy of these methods is evaluated by comparison with simulation.