A multi-hop synchronous wirelss network is said to be unknown if the nodes have no knowledge of the topology. A basic task in wireless network is that of broadcasting a message (created by a fixed source node) to all nodes of the network. The multi-broadcast that consists in performing a set of r independent broadcasts. In this paper, we study the completion and the termination time of distributed protocols for both the (single) broadcast and the multi-broadcast operations on unknown networks as functions of the number of nodes n, the maximum eccentricity D, the maximum in-degree Delta, and the congestion c of the networks. We establish new connections between these operations and some combinatorial concepts, such as selective families, strongly-selective families (also known as superimposed codes), and pairwise r-different families. Such connections, combined with a set of new lower and upper bounds on the size of the above families, allow us to derive new lower bounds and new distributed protocols for the broadcast and multi-broadcast operations. In particular, our upper bounds are almost tight and improve exponentially over the previous bounds when D and Delta are polylogarithmic in n. Network topologies having ``small'' eccentricity and ``small'' degree (such as bounded-degree expanders) are often used in practice to achieve efficient communication.