Flooding (computer networking)

Flooding is a routing algoritm and is very simple. Send every incoming packet out every outgoing link. It is important when using flooding to stop duplicated packets circulating forever. Possible methods include

• Put a hopcount or time to live on each packet (start at the diameter of the network or so).
• Have each node keep track of every packet seen, and only forward each packet exactly one time.

Advantages:

• If a packet can be deliviered, it will (probably multiple times).
• Since flooding chooses every path through the network, it chooses the shortest path.
• This algorithm is vey simple to implement.

Disadvantages:

• Flooding is very costly in terms of wasted bandwidth, but sometimes that's OK (nuclear power plants, aircraft control systems, etc).