@Flood: Auto-Tunable Flooding for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

J. Mocito, L. Rodrigues, and H. Miranda

Selected sections of this report were published in the proceedings of the 16th Euro-Par 2010, Ischia, Naples, Italy, August 2010. Springer.

Abstract

Flooding is a fundamental building block in multi-hop networks (both mobile and static); for instance, many routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks use flooding as part of their route discovery/maintenance procedures. Unfortunately, most flooding algorithms have configuration parameters that must be tuned according to the execution environment, in order to provide the best possible performance. Given that ad hoc environments are inherently unpredictable, dynamic, and often heterogeneous, anticipating the most adequate configuration of these algorithms is a challenging task.

This paper presents @Flood, an adaptive protocol for flooding in wireless ad hoc networks that allows each node to auto-tune the configuration parameters, or even change the forwarding algorithm, according to the properties of the execution environment. Using @Flood, nodes auto-configure themselves, circumventing the need for pre-configuring all the devices in the network for the expected operational conditions, which is impractical or even impossible in very dynamic environments. Also available extended report (pdf)


Luís Rodrigues