An analytical model for broadcasting by self pruning in wireless ad hoc networks

The broadcast operation is a fundamental service in wireless ad hoc networks. The naïve flooding mechanism may trigger a great number of data retransmissions at the same time and congest the networks, resulting in the broadcast storm problem. Self pruning is a simple heuristic, which reduces redundant data transmission of flooding, making use of the neighbor knowledge. However, exiting evaluation on self pruning is mainly based on experiments and greatly lacks detailed theoretical analysis. To this end, we propose in this paper an analytical model, which estimates the expected cost and the scalability of self pruning. To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed analytical model, we compare the analytical results with results obtained from the experiments. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed analytical model accurately estimates the expected cost and scalability of self pruning, especially when the density of nodes is