A Self-selection Technique for Flooding and Routing inWireless Ad-hoc Networks

There is a fundamental difference between wireless and wired networks, since the latter employ point-to-point communication while the former use broadcast transmission as the communication primitive. In this paper, we describe an algorithm, called selfselection, which takes advantage of broadcast communication to efficiently implement the basic operation of selecting a node possessing some desired properties among all the neighbors of the requestor. Self-selection employs a prioritized transmission back-off delay scheme in which each node’s delay of transmitting a signal is dependent on the probability of the node’s ability to best perform a pertinent task, and in turn, enables the node to autonomously select itself for the task.We demonstrate the benefits of selfselection in two basic wireless ad hoc network communication algorithms: flooding and routing. By relating back-off delay to the signal strength of a received packet, we design an efficient variant of conventional flooding called Signal Strength Aware Flooding. By using distance-to-destination to derive back-off delay, we design a novel and faulttolerant wireless ad hoc network routing protocol named Self-Selective Routing.