Broadcasting Protocols for Multi-Radio Multi-Channel and Multi-Rate Mesh Networks

A vast amount of broadcasting protocols has been developed for wireless ad hoc networks. To the best of our knowledge, however, these protocols assume a single-radio single-channel and single-rate network model and/or a generalized physical model, which does not take into account the impact of interference. In this paper, we present a set of broadcasting protocols to simultaneously achieve 100% reliability, minimum broadcasting latency, and minimum redundant transmissions. Our research distinguishes itself in a number of ways. First, a multi-radio multi-channel and multi-rate mesh network model is used. Second, the broadcasting tree is constructed by using local information without the global network topological information. Third, a comprehensive link quality metric is defined to fully take into account the interference. The link quality information is also made available to broadcasting protocols. Fourth, three performance metrics that include reliability, latency, and redundancy are simultaneously considered. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed protocols and compare the performance improvement to other protocols.