Reliable Local Broadcast in a Wireless Network Prone to Byzantine Failures.

Reliable broadcast can be a very useful primitive for many distributed applications, especially in the context of sensoractuator networks. Recently, the issue of reliable broadcast has been addressed in the context of the radio network model that is characterized by a shared channel, and where a transmission is heard by all nodes within the sender’s neighborhood. This basic defining feature of the radio network model can be termed as the reliable local broadcast assumption. However, in actuality, wireless networks do not exhibit such perfect and predictable behavior. Thus any attempt at distributed protocol design for multi-hop wireless networks based on the idealized radio network model requires the availability of a reliable local broadcast primitive that can provide guarantees of such idealized behavior. We present a simple proof-of-concept approach toward the implementation of a reliable local broadcast primitive with probabilistic guarantees, with the intent to highlight the potential for lightweight scalable solutions to achieve probabilistic reliable local broadcast in a wireless network.