On mitigating the broadcast storm problem with directional antennas

On mitigating the broadcast storm problem with directional antennas, Chunyu Hu, Yifei Hong, Jennifer Hou, IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2003. ICC'03. Vol. 1, Issue , 11-15 May 2003 Page(s): 104 - 110.

This is a short, breezy read. It considers three schemes to reduce the broadcast storm problem: one is to not rebroadcast on the sector which receives the packet to be broadcast; the second is to identify some relay nodes in each sector and to have these rebroadcast, hoping that these relays are enough to cover all the nodes; the third is to pick the relay which maximizes the new coverage. This means that the scheme retransmits first in the sector for which there is a node which covers the most new ground (ie. its own coverage area minus the area covered by forwarding the broadcast to this node in this sector).

The three schemes are intuitively sounds, and bring some performance benefits when evaluated through QualNet simulations. J. Hou is principal investigator for J-Sim, a simulation environment to perform this kind of evaluation, I guess qualnet was not the perfect tool then (for one thing, it is a commercial tool, whereas JSim is freely available).

Inconsequential details: this paper is written using word, which makes the equations look funky. And there is a little mix-up: "This is termed as the broadcast storm in [20]" in the abstract, and "This is termed as the broadcast storm in [7]" in the intro. The abstract is correct.