Towards congestion-aware all-to-all information dissemination in mobile ad-hoc networks

We discuss protocols for all-to-all dissemination in ad-hoc wireless networks. We identify shortcomings and challenges related to high traffic and explore their causes by observing the performance at the MAC layer. Through simulations we show that a congestion assessment mechanism can reduce more than 1/4 of the traffic on a good part of the nodes without affecting dissemination performance. We conclude that MAC-layer congestion awareness is important for improving application-level efficiency, and that we should not separate the two when dealing with all-to-all broadcasting.