Enhanced Dominant Pruning-based Broadcasting in Untrusted Ad-hoc Wireless Networks

Many protocols for ad-hoc wireless networks perform poorly in situations when node cooperation cannot be enforced. This may happen because of the lack of global authority over the nodes, or because of the environmental hostility. The net outcome of such scenarios is what we call a selfish behavior of nodes, which may spontaneously refuse to forward some packets. While unicast communication has been studied in this context, little has been done to improve the reliability of broadcasting in the face of limited trustworthiness of nodes. In this paper, we propose two enhancements of the popular broadcasting algorithms based on dominant pruning, which significantly improve the reachability of nodes in an unreliable ad-hoc wireless network. The improvement can be viewed as an enhancement of the network's fault tolerance, as it applies to most scenarios in which a node may fail to carry out its forwarding duties.