Probabilistic broadcasting based on coverage area and neighbor confirmation in mobile ad hoc networks

Broadcasting is a fundamental and effective data dissemination mechanism for route discovery, address resolution and many other network services in ad hoc networks. While data broadcasting has many advantages, it also causes some problems such as the broadcast storm problem, which is characterized by redundant retransmission, collision, and contention. Although many approaches have been proposed to solve them, none of them guarantees the lowest bound. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic broadcasting based on coverage area and neighbor confirmation in mobile ad hoc networks. We use the coverage area of a node to adjust the rebroadcast probability. If a mobile node is located in the area closer to sender, which means it has small additional coverage and rebroadcast from this node can reach less additional nodes, its rebroadcast probability is set lower. On the other hand, if a mobile node is located in the area far from the sender, which means that the additional coverage from this node is large, its rebroadcast probability is set higher. The coverage area can be estimated from the distance between sender and receiver and the distance can be estimated by signal strength or Global Positional System. Our approach combines the advantages of probabilistic and area based approach. Simulation results show that our approach can improve the average performance of broadcasting in various network scenarios. Our approach is simple and can be easily implemented in MANET.