Multipoint relaying for flooding broadcast messages in mobile wireless networks

We discuss the mechanism of multipoint relays (MPRs) to efficiently flood broadcast messages in mobile wireless networks. Multipoint relaying is a technique to reduce the number of redundant re-transmissions while diffusing a broadcast message in the network. We discuss the principle and the functioning of MPRs, and propose a heuristic to select these MPRs in a mobile wireless environment. We also analyze the complexity of this heuristic and prove that the computation of a multipoint relay set with minimal size is NP-complete. Finally, we present some simulation results to show the efficiency of multipoint relays.