Abstract

A family of message propagation protocols for highly mobile ad-hoc networks is defined, and is studied analytically and by simulation. The coverage of a message (the fraction of nodes that receive it), can be made arbitrarily close to 1, at a moderate cost of extra message traffic. Under certain simplifying assumptions, it is shown that a high coverage is achieved by making a total of O(n ln n) broadcasts, where n is the number of nodes, and the time to propagate a message is O(ln n). The effect of various parameters on the protocol performance is examined.

Keywords

Ad-hoc networks, mobility patterns, message propagation, broadcasting.