Fast Flooding using Cooperative Transmissions in Wireless Networks

Physical layer cooperation can be a powerful tool for enhancing the performance of multi-hop wireless networks. In this paper, we analyze the time to complete a cooperative broadcast to flood some information from one node to all nodes in a wireless network. We show that with cooperation the total time to complete the broadcast grows only logarithmically with the network diameter (unlike in traditional systems where time to flood increases linearly with the diameter). Simulation results validate the analysis, and show that the improvements in flooding time are more pronounced for higher density networks. We further compare the energy costs of cooperative and traditional flooding, and show that the improvements in flooding time with cooperation do not come at the expense of higher energy costs. These results, albeit based on an idealized form of cooperation, provide a strong motivation to develop and test practical schemes for cooperative flooding in multi-hop wireless networks.