Comparing the capacity of cooperative broadcast to spatial reuse TDMA in ad hoc networks

Cooperative broadcasting is a promising technique for efficient as well as robust broadcast of information in ad hoc networks. The paper compares the capacity of scheduled cooperative broadcasting with the capacity of Spatial Reuse TDMA (STDMA) for broadcast traffic in ad hoc networks. Three different routing methods for STDMA are considered: a tree-based solution; default MPR-flooding; and a robust version of MPR-flooding obtained by increasing the MPR coverage parameter. The results show that scheduled cooperative broadcasting, besides being robust, also has a higher capacity than STDMA unless the networks are dense, i.e., many neighbors and short average hop lengths. In that case STDMA is efficient as a packet can be broadcasted to the whole network with just a few retransmissions.