Characterising the interactions between unicast and broadcast in IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks

This paper investigates the relative performance of unicast and broadcast traffic traversing a one-hop ad hoc network utilising the 802.11 DCF. An extended Markov model has been developed and validated through computer simulation, which successfully predicts the respective performance of unicast and broadcast in a variety of mixed traffic scenarios. Under heavy network traffic conditions, a significant divergence is seen to develop between the performance of the two traffic classes - in particular, when network becomes saturated, unicast traffic is effectively given higher precedence over broadcast. As a result, the network becomes dominated by unicast frames, leading to poor rates of broadcast frame delivery.