Route discovery in wireless mobile ad hoc networks with adjusted probabilistic flooding

Message flooding has been extensively used in wireless mobile ad hoc networks for activities such as route and resource discovery. This can potentially lead to high channel contention, causing redundant retransmissions and thus excessive packet collisions in the network. Such a phenomenon has been shown to greatly increase the network communication overhead and end-to-end delay. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic method of flooding that adjusts the forwarding probability at a node using its local topological characteristics. Our simulation analysis reveals that equipping a routing protocol with the proposed adjusted probabilistic flooding for route discovery can result in a significant reduction of routing control overhead while achieving good throughput.