It is now commonly accepted that the unit disk graph used to model the
physical layer in wireless networks does not reflect real radio transmissions,
and that the lognormal shadowing model better suits to experimental
simulations. Previous work on realistic scenarios focused on unicast, while
broadcast requirements are fundamentally different and cannot be derived from
unicast case. Therefore, broadcast protocols must be adapted in order to still
be efficient under realistic assumptions. In this paper, we study the
well-known multipoint relay protocol (MPR). In the latter, each node has to
choose a set of neighbors to act as relays in order to cover the whole 2-hop
neighborhood. We give experimental results showing that the original method
provided to select the set of relays does not give good results with the
realistic model. We also provide three new heuristics in replacement and their
performances which demonstrate that they better suit to the considered model.
The first one maximizes the probability of correct reception between the node
and the considered relays multiplied by their coverage in the 2-hop
neighborhood. The second one replaces the coverage by the average of the
probabilities of correct reception between the considered neighbor and the
2-hop neighbors it covers. Finally, the third heuristic keeps the same concept
as the second one, but tries to maximize the coverage level of the 2-hop
neighborhood: 2-hop neighbors are still being considered as uncovered while
their coverage level is not higher than a given coverage threshold, many
neighbors may thus be selected to cover the same 2-hop neighbors