Predictive models to rebroadcast in mobile ad hoc networks

Network wide broadcast is a fundamental operation in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Several broadcast protocols have been proposed in the literature that improves on simple flooding by reducing the probability that a receiving node retransmits a packet. We propose analytical models to estimate these probabilities for three broadcast protocols. Our simulations show that these analytical models, which were derived under some simplifying assumptions, predict retransmission probabilities for static and mobile networks quite accurately when only the network layer is considered.