Exploiting Frequency Groups for Broadcasting in Multi-channel Multi-radio Networks

Network-wide broadcasting is a key requirement in military mobile ad hoc and sensor networks for supporting dissemination of routing control, situation reports, and other global traffic. Current methods for network-wide broadcasting are ill-suited for Multi-Channel Multi-Radio (MC-MR) networks because they do not exploit the presence of natural frequency groups for reducing the number of transmissions. We present Complex Activation Broadcasting (CAB) -- a decentralized algorithm for broadcasting in real-world MC-MR networks that captures naturally occurring groups and builds a tree that exploits them. Our approach is based on representing a network as a simplicial complex, which unlike a graph, allows higher-order aggregations necessary for natively capturing groups. Using a special kind of simplicial complex called a neighborhood sub complex, we present an algorithm for computing a broadcast tree. We have implemented our algorithm within the code base of a real-world military MANET, namely the DARPA WNaN network [1]. We compare the performance of our algorithm with the existing baseline. Results show that our algorithm uses 80 % less transmissions and 50% less receptions.