A Distributed Broadcast Algorithm for Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In Wireless mobile ad hoc networks, many unicast and multicast protocols depend on broadcast mechanism to finish control and route establishment functionality. In a straightforward broadcast by flooding, each node will retransmit a message to all it neighbors until the message has been propagated to the entire network. So it will become very inefficient and will be easy to result the broadcast storm problem. Thus an efficient broadcast algorithm should be used to less the broadcast storm caused by broadcast. Due to the dynamic nature of ad hoc networks, global information of the network is difficult to obtain, so the algorithm should be distributed. In this paper, a distributed heuristic-based algorithm is presented. The algorithm is based on joint distance-counter threshold scheme. It runs in a distributed manner by each node in the network without needing any global information. Each node in an ad hoc network hears the message from its neighbors and decides whether to retransmit or not according to the signal strength and the number of the receiving messages. By using the JDCT algorithm, it’s easy to find the nodes that consist of the vertices of the hexagonal lattice to cover the whole networks. The algorithm is very simple and it is easy to operate and has a good performance in mobile wireless communication environments. A comparison among several existing algorithms is conducted. Simulation results show that the new algorithm is efficient and robust.