Coverage-based probabilistic forwarding in ad hoc routing

Flooding is commonly used in reactive ad hoc routing protocols. Although simple and effective, flooding may incur excessive overhead. In order to reduce unnecessary rebroadcasts, probabilistic gossiping schemes have been proposed. These schemes, however, do not usually adapt the probability of forwarding to time-varying features of the network. To address this shortcoming, four new heuristics to adapt forwarding probability to coverage area and/or topology information are proposed. We show through simulations that the proposed schemes can reduce the number of routing requests by up to 35% compared with existing schemes, while delivering approximately the same amount of data packets.