We study the problem of broadcasting packets in wireless networks. At each
time slot, a network controller activates non-interfering links and forwards
packets to all nodes at a common rate; the maximum rate is referred to as the
broadcast capacity of the wireless network. Existing policies achieve the
broadcast capacity by balancing traffic over a set of spanning trees, which are
difficult to maintain in a large and time-varying wireless network. We propose
a new dynamic algorithm that achieves the broadcast capacity when the
underlying network topology is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This algorithm
utilizes local queue-length information, does not use any global topological
structures such as spanning trees, and uses the idea of in-order packet
delivery to all network nodes. Although the in-order packet delivery constraint
leads to degraded throughput in cyclic graphs, we show that it is throughput
optimal in DAGs and can be exploited to simplify the design and analysis of
optimal algorithms. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has
superior delay performance as compared to tree-based approaches.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of INFOCOM, 201
