Designing statistical multi-hop wireless broadcast protocols using confidence levels from stochastic models of reachability

Multi-hop wireless broadcast is a critical component in ad-hoc wireless networks. Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) in particular utilize broadcast as a primary communication mechanism in many applications. Because of their simplicity, statistical broadcasting methods have been adopted in several VANET broadcasting schemes. However, it is difficult to develop analytical models of these protocols, therefore no results are known proving reachability characteristics for them like there are for topological protocols such as Multi-Point Relaying (MPR).