Transmission scheduling for gossiping in multihop packet radio networks

Abstract

Routing information updates, exchange of congestion control information, and synchronisation in distributed computation environments may require that some information from all the nodes be broadcast to all the nodes in the network. We consider such all-to-all broadcast, or gossiping as it is known in the literature, in multihop packet radio networks in an ad hoc network setup. Scheduling of transmissions in a packet radio network can be done either deterministically or randomly. The use of deterministic scheduling algorithms for ad hoc (multihop radio) networks whose topologies are dynamic may not be practical and transmission scheduling with randomised transmissions may be better suited in these networks. We study the performance of deterministic and randomised algorithms for scheduling for a class of communication requirements, called gossiping, in multihop radio networks.