Route and service discovery in wireless multi-hop networks applies flooding or
gossip routing to disseminate and gather information. Since packets may get
lost, retransmissions of lost packets are required. In many protocols the
retransmission timeout is fixed in the protocol specification. In this
technical report we demonstrate that optimization of the timeout is required
in order to ensure proper functioning of flooding schemes. Based on an
experimental study, we apply percolation theory and derive analytical models
for computing the optimal restart timeout. To the best of our knowledge, this
is the first comprehensive study of gossip routing, percolation, and restart
in this context
