Efficient Broadcasting in MANETs by Selective Forwarding

Abstract

A major challenge faced in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is
locating devices for communication, especially in the case of
high node mobility and sparse node density. Present solutions
provided by the ad hoc routing protocols range from flooding
the entire network with route requests, to deploying a separate
location management scheme to maintain a device location database.
Many applications as well as various unicast routing protocols
such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On Demand Distance
Vector (AODV), Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP), and Location Aided
Routing (LAR) use broadcasting or a derivation of it. Flooding
is expensive in terms of overhead and wastes valuable resources
such as bandwidth and power. We propose to develop a strategy
to reduce the redundant transmission of packets in normal flooding
used in broadcasting and we describe strategies for choosing only
a minimal set of nodes to re-broadcast in grid networks. Our
strategies reduce the redundant transmission of packets, thus
packets are forwarded with a minimal number of transmissions.
To determine the minimal set of nodes we propose a new algorithm
called Efficient Broadcasting by Selective Forwarding (EBSF)
that uses a distance-based approach in selecting the nodes among
all the nodes in a grid network. The distance-based approach
is implemented for broadcast and rebroadcast to a set of nodes
with the help of a threshold value
that reduces the number of redundant transmission. This threshold
value can be tuned to show the performance enhancement.