METHOD FOR CONTROLLING FLOOD BROADCASTS IN A WIRELESS MESH NETWORK

Computer networks with multiple nodes are often required to deliver packets to all nodes in the network, commonly referred to as "flooding." Flooding is used to deliver multicast and broadcast packets generated by application, network and other layers of the networking stack. Flooding can be done very reliably but less efficiently via node to node "unicast" transmissions, or very efficiently but less reliably via "broadcast" transmissions. In order to balance reliability with efficiency, this invention defines a threshold for the number of neighboring nodes as seen by a given node prior to a flooding operation to determine whether data should be unicast or broadcast. Below that threshold, unicast is used; at or above that threshold, broadcast is used. The invention also incorporates knowledge of nodes seen in turn by neighbor nodes as part of this decision.