A High Performance Cluster-Based Flooding Algorithm for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

A cluster-based flooding algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks has been proposed. This mechanism uses a novel gateway usage approach. Dividing the flooding traffic to internal and external from each cluster point of view, gateway selection is just needed for the internal traffic. This simplifies the gateway selection method as well as improving the flooding performance parameters. The stability-based clustering algorithm has been used as the underlying clustering method. The stability advantage of this clustering method has been shown before by comprehensive simulations over different mobile environments. The performance parameters of the proposed flooding algorithm have been observed using simulations conducted over a number of environments and compared with other flooding methods. Results show the improvement of parameters such as flooding coverage as well as the number of rebroadcasts over other flooding algorithms.