Adaptive Probabilistic Flooding for Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is one of the most fundamental operations in mobile ad hoc networks. Broadcasting serves as a building block in many routing protocols. The simplest approach for broadcasting is flooding. However، it generates many redundant messages that cause to loss of scarce resources such bandwidth and battery powers and it may lead to contention، collision and extreme decrease of network performance. Many schemes have been developed to improve the performance of flooding algorithm that are mainly classified into two basic approaches: deterministic and probabilistic approaches، of which the second is more considered. However، the existing schemes either increase the latency or decrease the reach ability of the algorithm. In this paper، we propose a new scheme to improve the performance of flooding algorithm. The basis of the new method is the probabilistic rebroadcasting based on local observations. In this method، the probability function of each node is adjusted dynamically based on local observations. Simulation results show that the new scheme considerably decrease average latency compared with similar existing schemes while maintaining the reach ability and saving messages.