Time-Efficient Broadcast in Radio Networks

Broadcasting is a basic network communication task, where a message initially held by a source node has to be disseminated to all other nodes in the network. Fast algorithms for broadcasting in radio networks have been studied in a wide variety of different models and under different requirements. Some of the main parameters giving rise to the different variants of the problem are the accessibility of knowledge about the network topology, the availability of collision detection mechanisms, the wake-up mode, the topology classes considered, and the use of randomness. This chapter introduces the problem, reviews the literature on time-efficient broadcasting algorithms for radio networks under a variety of models and assumptions, and illustrates some of the basic techniques.