This article is highly cited because it solves one of the fundamental problems in wireless ad hoc networks, which is a research area that is currently recognized as one of the priority fields within the electrical engineering and computer science domains. Special cases of ad hoc networks include sensor networks for monitoring environment, mesh networks for wireless Internet access, multi-hop cellular networks, and conference, battlefield, and rescue scenarios. Research activities are booming due to granting opportunities in Europe and North America, and pioneering works receive much attention.

Yes, it does, because the problem is a fundamental one. In a multihop ad hoc wireless network, each node has a transmission radius and is able to send a message to all of its neighbors that are located within the radius. In a broadcasting task, a source node sends the same message to all the nodes in the network. The problem is fundamental because of its application in route discovery, location updates, geocasting, alarming, task distribution, and other basic routines in ad hoc networks.

In this article, we propose to significantly reduce or eliminate the communication overhead of a broadcasting task by applying the concept of localized dominating sets. Their maintenance does not require any communication overhead in addition to maintaining positions of neighboring nodes. Retransmissions by only internal nodes in a dominating set is sufficient for reliable broadcasting. Existing dominating sets are improved by using node degrees instead of their ids as primary keys. We also propose to eliminate neighbors that already received the message, and re-broadcast only if the list of neighbors that might need the message is nonempty. A retransmission after negative acknowledgements scheme is also described. The important features of proposed algorithms are their reliability (reaching all nodes in the absence of message collisions), significant rebroadcast savings, and their localized and parameterless behavior.