Optimizing responses to broadcast messages in radio networks

Algorithms to optimize the performance of response traffic for broadcast messages in a packet-switched radio network are studied. The situation considered here involves a source node sending a broadcast message to all destinations and collecting positive response packets from these destinations in a fully connected packet radio network. The exact value of the number of destination nodes is unknown. A contention-based two-level protocol is described. Based on the protocol, an optimization problem is formulated in order to minimize the time for the source node to receive all the responses. Several algorithms are presented and numerical results of the corresponding optimization problems are obtained. These optimization problems are treated by the methods of dynamic programming. An extension of the basic scheme—multicast instead of full broadcast message—is also studied.